Abstract
Communication inspired by animals is a timely topic of research in the modeling and control of multi-agent systems. Examples of such bio-inspired communication methods include pheromone trails used by ants to forage for food and echolocation used by bats to orient themselves and hunt. Source searching is one of many challenges in the field of swarm robotics that tackles an analogous problem to animals foraging for food. This paper seeks to compare two communication methods, inspired by sonar and pheromones, in the context of a multi-agent foraging problem. We explore which model is more effective at recruiting agents to forage from a found target. The results of this work begin to uncover the complicated relationship between sensing modality, collective tasks, and spontaneous cooperation in groups.