A modular approach using object-oriented Petri-nets to model ethology inspired scenarios for cooperative mobile minirobotics

The paper presents an approach based on object oriented Petri nets, to model ethology inspired scenarios for cooperative mobile minirobotics. The authors are particularly interested in recruitment mechanisms of ant colonies. So, they develop a model for a specific mechanism which is tandem or group recruitment. For this purpose, they have defined generic modules whose combination leads to the model obtained. Scaling down the size of the robots inspires missions that can capitalise on several agents. Therefore, one is in a multi-agent context and an agent is an autonomous mobile minirobot. Thus, an organisation is involved in the system since it is possible to get an answer for the question: "who" does "what"? Properties of the model developed are verified and examples of simulation results are shown.