A fire ant inspired multi-agent system: a useful contribution to the ocean cleanup problem
Summary
The pollution of our environment is currently an issue that requires our immediate attention. One part of this problem is the plastic pollution of the oceans. An upcoming area of research in solving this problem is the application of robotics. In this paper the behaviour of fire ants is used as an inspiration in a model that simulates the cleaning of ocean trash. In order to determine if the addition of the fire ant behaviour to this ocean cleanup model is useful, the model is compared to a verification model. A comparison of the two models showed that the model with the additional fire ant behaviour performs better significantly. These results indicate that further research in this area is worth the effort.