Supplementary file 1_Comparing simulation and physical kilobots performance in two ant-inspired foraging behaviours.docx

Social animals often share information about food source locations like tandem running in ants, where a leader guides a naive recruit to a known profitable food site. This is extremely advantageous as it allows the sharing of important information among colony members, but it also has costs, such as waiting time inside the nest when no leaders are around, and a reduced walking speed for the tandem couple compared to individuals.

Whether and when these costs outweigh the benefits is not well understood as it is challenging to study complex social behaviours in nature. We developed two kilobot-based approaches to compare tandem running and lone scout foraging (using an isotropic random walk) where an ant searches for food without any previous knowledge of its location: one approach based on real-life experiments and the other one on computer simulations.