Related papers: The ANTS problem
Many ant species employ distributed population density estimation in applications ranging from quorum sensing [Pra05], to task allocation [Gor99], to appraisal of enemy colony strength [Ada90]. It has been shown that ants estimate density…
Treasure hunt and rendezvous are fundamental tasks performed by mobile agents in graphs. In treasure hunt, an agent has to find an inert target (called treasure) situated at an unknown node of the graph. In rendezvous, two agents, initially…
We study the problem of collective tree exploration in which a team of $k$ mobile agents must collectively visit all nodes of an unknown tree in as few moves as possible. The agents all start from the root and discover adjacent edges as…
The ants process is a stochastic process introduced by Kious, Mailler and Schapira as a model for the phenomenon of ants finding shortest paths between their nest and a source of food (seen as two marked nodes in a finite graph), with no…
Ant species such as Temnothorax albipennis select a new nest site in a distributed fashion that, if modeled correctly, can serve as useful information for site selection algorithms for robotic swarms and other applications. Studying and…
The dispersion problem has received much attention recently in the distributed computing literature. In this problem, $k\leq n$ agents placed initially arbitrarily on the nodes of an $n$-node, $m$-edge anonymous graph of maximum degree…
Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence have shown that the combination of tree-based planning with deep learning can lead to superior performance. We present Adaptive Entropy Tree Search (ANTS) - a novel algorithm combining…
With the increasing demand and complexity of networks, factors such as balancing the load, improving the performance, reducing delay and finding optimal path between nodes in a computer network have become crucial. The traditional routing…
In this paper, we study the treasure hunt problem in a graph by a mobile agent. The nodes in the graph $G=(V,E)$ are anonymous and the edges incident to a vertex $v\in V$ whose degree is $deg(v)$ are labeled arbitrarily as $0,1,\ldots,…
Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has evolved into a highly promising issue owing to the latest breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), among other reasons. This emerging growth increases the need to…
A mobile agent has to find an inert treasure hidden in the plane. Both the agent and the treasure are modeled as points. This is a variant of the task known as treasure hunt. The treasure is at a distance at most $D$ from the initial…
We consider the problem of finding a treasure at an unknown point of an $n$-dimensional infinite grid, $n\geq 3$, by initially collocated finite state agents (scouts/robots). Recently, the problem has been well characterized for 2…
We study a new search problem on the plane involving a robot and an immobile treasure, initially placed at distance $1$ from each other. The length $\beta$ of an arc (a fence) within the perimeter of the corresponding circle, as well as the…
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a well-known method inspired by the foraging behavior of ants and is extensively used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we first consider a general framework based on the concept…
Applications of ACO algorithms to obtain better solutions for combinatorial optimization problems have become very popular in recent years. In ACO algorithms, group of agents repeatedly perform well defined actions and collaborate with…
Navigation through narrow passages during colony relocation by the tandem-running ants, $\textit{Diacamma}$ $\textit{indicum}$, is a tour de force of biological traffic coordination. Even on one-lane paths, the ants tactfully manage a…
We study the problem of distributed task allocation inspired by the behavior of social insects, which perform task allocation in a setting of limited capabilities and noisy environment feedback. We assume that each task has a demand that…
Ants are known to be able to find paths of minimal length between the nest and food sources. The deposit of pheromones while they search for food and their chemotactical response to them has been proposed as a crucial element in the…
It is well-known in biology that ants are able to find shortest paths between their nest and the food by successive random explorations, without any mean of communication other than the pheromones they leave behind them. This striking…
We tackle the Thief Orienteering Problem (ThOP), an academic multi-component problem that combines two classical combinatorial problems, namely the Knapsack Problem and the Orienteering Problem. In the ThOP, a thief has a time limit to…