Extending the RoboCup Rescue to Support Stigmergy: Experiments and Results

Social insects have inspired researches in computer sciences as well asengineers to develop models for coordination and cooperation in multiagent systems.One example of these models is the model of stigmergy. In this model agents useindirect communication (comunication trough the environment) in order to coordinateactions. The RoboCup Rescue simulator is used as a testbed to evaluate this modelin a real world considering a highly constrained scenario of an earthquake. This pa-per investigates the feasibility of using stigmergy in the RoboCup Rescue and theimprovements of performance can be obtained. We extended the RoboCup Rescueenvironment to enable the use of stigmergy by the agents. We compared the results ofa multiagent system that uses stigmergy against two other approaches: a multiagentsystem that uses a greedy strategy and no communication, and a multiagent systemwhere agents communicate via direct messages. Experimental results shown that theuse of stigmergy leads to an improvement on agents’ performance by 9.02% to 38.6%if comparing to the system with no communication and can be statistically equivalentto the system which uses messages, depending on the scenario