The call of duty: Self-organised task allocation in a population of up to twelve mobile robots

Teams with up to 12 real robots were given the mission to maintain the energy stocked in their nest by collecting food-items. To achieve this mission efficiently, we implemented a simple and decentralised task allocation mechanism based on individual activation-thresholds, i.e. the energy level of the nest under which a given robot decides to go collect food-items. The experiments show that such a mechanism - already studied among social insects - results in an efficient dynamical task allocation even under the noisy conditions prevailing in real experiments. Experiments with different team sizes were carried out to investigate the effect of team size on performance and risk of mission failure. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.