This paper presents the design of ant-inspired control strategies that mimic the ant colony foraging behavior. Inter-agent communication, in particular explicit communication is applied to create multiple cooperating mobile robots in order to accomplish the foraging task. Explicit communication can significantly multiply the capabilities and effectiveness of teams of robotic systems. However, the drawback is it introduces more interference among robots at the goal and home region in comparison to robotic system without the implementation of inter-agent communication. Thus, to investigate how well the explicit communication can be adopted in designing efficient cooperative mobile robotic system, experiments were carried out on the simulated robots. The efficiency of the strategies are measured in terms of three criteria: time, density of robots and interference.

A methodology for three-dimensional collision-free path planning by which planning is done in the three-dimensional orthogonal two-dimensional projections of a three-dimensional environment is presented, Collision checking is done in each of the three orthogonal two-dimensional subspaces using primitive path segments. A hierarchical-path search method is used to speed up the search process. This approach forms basis for spatial planning in environments where no a priori knowledge is assumed. The three orthogonal two-dimensional projections can be readily obtained from three orthogonal cameras in simple environments.

We present a methodology for 3-D collision-free path planning in which planning is done in the 3-orthogonal 2-D projections of a 3-D environment. Suboptimal path searching is done in each of the 3 orthogonal 2-D subspaces using primitive path segments. A hierarchical path searching method is introduced to speed up the search process. This approach lends applications to spatial planning in environments where no a priori knowledge is assumed. The three orthogonal 2-D projections can be readily obtained from 3 orthogonal cameras in simple environments.