Social Target Localization in a Population of Foragers

Foraging has been identified as a benchmark for collective robotics. It consists on exploring an area and gathering prespecified objects from the environment. In addition to efficiently exploring an area, foragers have to be able to find special targets which are common to the whole population. This work proposes a method to cooperatively perform this particular task. Instead of using local or global localization strategies which can rely on the infrastructure installed in the environment, the proposed approach takes advantage of the knowledge gathered by the population about the localization of the targets. Robots communicate in an instrinsic way the estimation about how near they are from a target, and these estimations guide the navigation of the whole population when looking for these specific areas. The results comprehend some tests assessing the performance, robustness, and scalability of the approach. The proposed approach efficiently guides the robots towards the prespecified targets while allowing the modulation of their speed.