Moving Depot (MOD): Efficient Depot Motion for Multi-Robot Foraging

A moving-depot strategy for improving foraging performance in multi-robot systems.

Multi-robot foraging usually assumes a fixed depot: robots travel between resources and a home location. In dynamic or spatially uneven environments, that fixed point can become a bottleneck. MOD moves the depot adaptively using a weighted centroid strategy and potential-field planning so that the depot follows useful structure in the environment.

This work was presented at ANTS 2024 and grew out of my broader interest in how simple local rules and spatial organization shape collective performance.