Cooperative c-Marking Agents for the Foraging Problem

International audience ; We consider the problem of foraging with multiple agents, in which agents must collect disseminate resources in an unknown and complex environment. So far, reactive multi-agent systems have been proposed, where agents can perform simultaneously exploration and path planning. In this work, we aim to decrease exploration and foraging time by increasing the level of cooperation between agents; to this end, we present in this paper a novel pheromone modeling in which pheromone's propagation and evaporation are managed by agents. As in c-marking agents, our agents are provided with very limited perceptions, and they can mark their environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the c-marking agent-based systems in a foraging mission.