Abstract
We study how to coordinate a team of agents to locate a hidden source on a two-dimensional discrete grid. The challenge is to find the position of the source with only sporadic detections. This problem arises in various situations, for instance when insects emit pheromones to attract their partners. A search mechanism named infotaxis was proposed to explain how agents may progressively approach the source by using only intermittent detections.
Here, we study the problem of doing a collective infotaxis search with agents that are almost memoryless. We present a bio-inspired model which mixes stochastic cellular automata and reactive multi-agent systems. The model, inspired by the behaviour of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, relies on the use of reaction-diffusion waves to guide the agents to the source. The random emissions of waves allows the formation of a group of amoebae, which successively act as emitters of waves or listeners, according to their local perceptions. We present a first study that shows that the model is worth considering and may provide a simple solution to coordinate a team to perform a distributed form of infotaxis.
Keywords
- Bio-inspired models
- Multi-agent systems
- Infotaxis
- Asynchronous cellular automata
- Probabilistic cellular automata
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- 1.
We make a slight abuse in notations because we use the formalism of classical dynamical systems even though our function F is stochastic.
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Fatès, N. (2016). Collective Infotaxis with Reactive Amoebae: A Note on a Simple Bio-inspired Mechanism. In: El Yacoubi, S., Wąs, J., Bandini, S. (eds) Cellular Automata. ACRI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9863. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44365-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44365-2_15
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