Global Games with Negative Feedback for Autonomous Colony Maintenance using Robot Teams

In this article we address the colony maintenance problem, where a team of robots are tasked with continuously maintaining the energy supply of an autonomous colony. We model this as a global game, where robots measure the energy level of a central nest to determine whether or not to forage for energy sources. We design a mechanism that avoids the trivial equilibrium where all robots always forage. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when the game is played iteratively a negative feedback term stabilizes the number of foraging robots at a non-trivial Nash equilibrium. We compare our approach qualitatively to existing global games, where a positive positive feedback term admits threshold-based decision making, and encourages many robots to forage simultaneously. We discuss how positive feedback can lead to a cascading failure in the presence of a human who recruits robots for external tasks, and we demonstrate the performance of our approach in simulation.