Ant-Inspired Fuzzily Deceptive Robots

Deception plays a leading role in many intelligent systems. In order to model the uncertainties and make artificial deception near the one existing in the real world, fuzzy theory seems a reasonable tool. This study is the pioneering one to incorporate fuzzy logic concepts into the phenomenon of deceptive robotics. In this study, a hide-and-seek process is considered in a maze imaginable in any form between two robots, one of which is basically trying to deceive the other. The fuzzy definition of behavioral strategies based on past experience for both the deceiver and the competitor robot makes them act like human beings in conflict with each other. Combining the fuzzy reasoning with ant-inspired metaheuristics is another aspect of novelty in this study: Fulfilling the deception, the deceiver is supposed to produce two deceptive signals (track and pheromone) using a fuzzy inference system in order to arrange the environment as desired. After the deceiver decides where to go, the robot under deception is to decide which path to choose based on a utility function calculated within a hierarchical fuzzy inference system whose direct inputs are the value of deception signals and also his behavioral strategy. Since the ant-inspired deception signal varies by passing time, not always will everything look like as the deceiver designs. In addition, in order to test the experimental results along with the simulations, special robots with demanded features are designed and manufactured who benefit from a vision-based feedback to move in a real maze. The results of a series of extensive experiments give an evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed deception algorithm in terms of a sufficiently high deception success percentage. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that even the rare cases of deception failure speak for the human reasoning abilities of the robots, which is another support to effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, due to the nature of the problem, here, we will face a noncooperative game with incomplete information between rational players in which the belief of the robot under deception is manipulated by the deceiver through the arrangement of the environment by deception signals.