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This paper investigates simulated mobbing behavior in Braitenbergian robots within the Webots environment. The study explores how varying the range of "mobbing calls" (simulated communication) and group size affects the success of robots in collectively harassing a light source representing a predator. Results show that both call range and group size significantly influence mobbing effectiveness, with implications for understanding collective behavior in artificial agents.
Simple Braitenberg robots can exhibit complex mobbing behavior with performance highly dependent on communication range and group size.
We used the Webots robotics simulation platform to simulate a dyadic avoiding and mobbing predator behavior in a group of Braitenbergian robots. Mobbing is an antipredator adaptation used by some animals in which the individuals cooperatively attack or harass a predator to protect themselves. One way of coordinating a mobbing attack is using mobbing calls to summon other individuals of the mobbing species. We imitated this mechanism and simulated Braitenbergian robots that use mobbing calls when they face a light source (representing an inanimate predator) and mob it if they can summon allies, otherwise, they escape from it. We explore the effects of range of mobbing call (infinite range, mid-range and low-range) and the size of the robot group (ten robots vs three) on the overall success of mobbing. Our results suggest that both variables have significant impacts. This work has implications for simulations of action selection in artificial life and designing control architectures for autonomous agents.
