Foraging behaviour of multi-robot system and emergence of swarm intelligence

We focus on the quantitative aspect of the multi-robot system and discuss the emergence of swarm intelligence. Emergence of swarm intelligence is investigated through the foraging task. As the robots assumed in the paper are very simple in order to discuss their behavior analytically, there are few parameters to characterize their behavior such as interaction duration. The behavior of the system is investigated by computer simulation and mathematical model. We choose two types of foraging task: one is carrying pucks to the home and the other is gathering pucks to an unfixed point. Efficiency of the swarm depends on the interaction duration between each robot, and we find out that there is an optimum interaction duration in each task. We also find out that the system shows a kind of pattern formation under certain conditions.