Physical deployment of digital pheromones through RFID technology

Pheromone-based multiagent interaction has received a growing attention in the past few years. Still, so far, the number of deployed systems exploiting pheromones for coordinating activities of distributed agents/robots situated in physical environments has been very limited. In this context, this paper presents a real-world, low- cost and general-purpose, implementation of pheromone interaction, realized by making use of RFID tags technology. Humans and robots can spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags that are likely to populate our everyday environments. The proposed solution is tested and evaluated via an application for object-tracking, allowing robots and humans to find "forgot-somewhere" objects. The application works by letting objects spread digital pheromones trails that can be tracked afterwards. The paper presents several experiments to assess the effectiveness of our approach, outlines its limitations, and sketches further potential application scenarios.