Investigating dominant situation of resting behavior as a potential labor pool in robotic swarm for group foraging

The foraging task is a commonly studied scenario for distributed swarm robotic systems. The robots switch searching and resting behavior in a distributed manner to perform foraging quickly and energy efficiently. It is known that robots that are resting can act as a potential labor pool in addition to saving energy. Because they function as a potential labor pool, resting robots can help with foraging if needed. In this study, we consider the group foraging task, which requires two or more robots to transport a food item. In a group foraging task, resting robots can help with the transportation of a heavy food item in response to the recruitment of other robots. Until now, the efficacy of the resting behavior as a potential labor pool has been suggested, but the environments in which this function is dominant is still unknown. In this study, we propose a state-transition model for robots that includes the resting behavior and investigate the performance through multi-agent simulation. By comparing models with and without the resting behavior, we found that the function of the resting behavior as a potential labor pool is dominant in cases when the food items are heavy or the population is small.