Multi–Robot Foraging for Swarms of Simple Robots

In multi–robot systems, a large number of individual robots work together to per-form a task. Large swarms of robots have the potential to be useful for types of tasks for which traditional robots are not well suited, such as large area surveillance, dis-tributed contaminant cleanup, and in–vitro medical applications. Although a variety of possible robots could be used in such swarms, the large numbers involved usually force each robot to be small and simple. This dissertation focuses on robots with very simple hardware capabilities. In this work, the robots are not assumed to have global position information, global communication, odometry, or a central leader, and their only communication capabilities are simple local neighbor–to–neighbor communica-tion. To overcome their hardware limitations and leverage their large numbers, the robots must work together. This dissertation is focused on foraging as a multi–robot task. Robots start at a home location, explore the world in search of their target, and return the target incrementally to the home. It is difficult in swarm robotic systems because of th