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...ts end up being active foragers. The same mechanism is also effective in exploiting mechanical differences among the robots inducing specialization in the robots activities. More details are given in =-=[12, 13]-=-. 5.2. Functional self-assembly We call functional self-assembly the self-assembling into a swarm-bot of a group of s-bots triggered by environmental contingencies that prevent a single s-bot from per...

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...ts end up being active foragers. The same mechanism is also effective in exploiting mechanical differences among the robots inducing specialisation in the robots activities. More details are given in =-=[11,12]-=-. 3.6 Navigation on rough terrain Navigating on rough terrain is an important feature for an adaptive autonomous system, that can open many possible application scenarios, like space exploration or re...

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...nical constraints obliged us also to use only one colony size, leaving as future work the study of further aspects, such as the dependencies on group size and on the prey density. In a previous work (=-=Labella et al., 2004-=-), we showed that a variant of this model, described in Section 3, can improve the efficiency of the colony by reducing the number of robots looking for prey. Here, we show that the improvement is ach...

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...e task “lives” less than the overall system. In our case, a task is something that “lives” as long as the SANET itself. The examples provided in Sec. 3 make this definition clearer. Our previous work =-=[3, 4]-=- demonstrated how a simple learning mechanism could be useful to improve the efficiency of a group of autonomous robots. The learning, inspired by ants’ foraging, was also able to introduce self-organ...

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...ng in Swarm Robotics 697 animals before and after tasks to quantify energy spent and gained. In robotics, the vocabulary is less well established. Terms such as reward, income, benefit have been used =-=[4,5,6,7]-=-. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the term energy, as in biology. Foraging efficiently is thus a quest to maximize the energy of a group of foraging robots. Robotics researchers often consider...

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...en themselves and the nearby environment (see e.g. collective box pushing [5], cooperative transport of prey items [6], construction of a nest site [7] and foraging of food items from the environment =-=[8, 9]-=-). However, we argue that as SR begins to be applied in situations that are more complex in terms of the number of tasks they involve, there will be a need for more specialised heterogeneous groups of...

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...lore under what conditions the swarm exhibits optimal behaviour. Swarm analysis is usually carried out either by testing real robot implementations, or by computational simulations; see, for example, =-=[7, 11]-=-. However, each of these only examines a relatively small number of the possible swarm behaviours and so, especially where swarms are to be deployed in safety (or business) critical areas, these appro...