Recruiting robots perform stochastic diffusion search

A Letter to Nature demonstrated that a simple ant-inspired ‘tandem calling’ recruitment mechanism improved task performance in a group of robots. In these experiments a group of robots attempt to locate ‘food’ and return it to base. On its return a successful robot tries to recruit another to help exploit its find. As a result a population of robots rapidly expands to exploit the resource, resulting in greater foraging efficacy. In this note we observe that the type of recruitment and information sharing mechanism employed by the robots is one instance of a general class of Swarm Intelligence parallel search and optimisation methods, known as Stochastic Diffusion Search (SDS).