Free Market Economies as a Model for Robotic Swarm Foraging

Nathaniel Pearson*, John Little*, Dillan Wilson*, and Yu Gu
Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation No.: 62

Assigned Category (Presentation Format): Engineering (Poster Presentations)

Student’s Major: Computer Engineering

Robotic swarm foraging combines localized exploration of an environment with the global goal of returning gathered resources back to a collection site. Swarms are well suited to complex logistical problems like foraging because of the inherent robustness that emerges from their flat hierarchy and interchangeability. The potential applications of swarm foraging include search and rescue, trash removal, and planetary resource harvesting. The presented research describes a decentralized means of collaborative foraging based on a free market economy. Using decision processes derived from economic theory the individual agents buy and sell resources amongst themselves to maximize individual success, which is expected to also improve the swarm’s success. By emphasizing individual decision making we expect emergent behaviours between agents to arise that allow the swarm to adapt itself to changing conditions. A discrete world simulation was created to test the effectiveness of our proposed model. The simulation results will be used to evaluate the proposed swarm foraging free market based model and to make comparisons to other methods that use non-collaborative strategies.

Funding: NSF, Award # 1851815

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: the WVU Robotics REU (Yu Gu & Jason Gross)