Self-organized Path Formation with Avoiding the Obstructions by Ant Robot

Abstract

A formation of the shortest path from a nest to a food area was investigated by using small ant robots. Ants communicate by a pheromone in nature. When an ant discovers food, it goes back marking a pheromone on its way to the nest. Its fellows follow the trace of the pheromone and then they also mark the pheromone on their way to the nest after arriving at the food area. At the early stage, the route is a complicated line. A lot of ants' coming and going optimize the route from the nest to the food area. We propose the new pheromone field that has an important feature of real pheromone:i.e., evaporation. Under the condition of the existence of the obstruction on the way to the food area, the experiments of path optimization were carried out by using both the ant robot and the pheromone field. The experiments demonstrated that our ant system was applicable to the optimization problem.