Communication of behavorial state in multi-agent retrieval tasks

The impact on performance of a society of robots in a foraging task when simple communication is introduced is assessed. Results are obtained comparing task achievement in the absence of inter-agent communication relative to performance given the minimal knowledge of the behavorial state of fellow agents. Simple communication can result in significant performance enhancement. More robots generally mean more efficient use of time, and an overall speedup of goal recovery. Upon inspection of the larger body of results, which give the percentage of timeouts per number of shots, it is apparent that there is greater tendency for timing out with fewer robots. The distance graphs indicate that by adding robots, independent of communication, the task can be accomplished faster.>