Blinkered LOST: Restricting sensor field of view can improve scalability in emergent multi-robot trail following

We consider the classical task of transporting resources from source to home by a group of autonomous robots. The robots use ant-like trail following to navigate between home and source. This paper studies the effect on global performance of changing the field of view of each robot's trail-following sensor. It is shown that, under certain conditions, a narrow field of view can improve system performance. We argue that the benefit is obtained by selectively degrading the individuals' trail-following ability so that more work space is exploited in parallel, thus decreasing mutual spatial interference. This “worse-is-better” idea may be applicable to other large-scale multi-robot systems.