Costs and benefits of behavioral specialization

In this work, we study behavioral specialization in a swarm of autonomous robots. In the studied swarm, a robot working repeatedly on the same type of task improves in task performance due to learning. Robots may exploit this positive effect of learning by selecting with higher probability the tasks on which they have improved their performance. However, even though the exploitation of such performance-improving effects is clearly a benefit, specialization also entails certain costs. Using a task allocation strategy that allows the robots to behaviorally specialize, we study the trade-off between costs and benefits in simulation experiments. Additionally, we give a perspective on the impact of this trade-off in systems that use specialization. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.SCOPUS: cp.k