  In this article we address the colony maintenance problem, where a team of
robots are tasked with continuously maintaining the energy supply of an
autonomous colony. We model this as a global game, where robots measure the
energy level of a central nest to determine whether or not to forage for energy
sources. We design a mechanism that avoids the trivial equilibrium where all
robots always forage. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when the game is played
iteratively a negative feedback term stabilizes the number of foraging robots
at a non-trivial Nash equilibrium. We compare our approach qualitatively to
existing global games, where a positive positive feedback term admits
threshold-based decision making, and encourages many robots to forage
simultaneously. We discuss how positive feedback can lead to a cascading
failure in the presence of a human who recruits robots for external tasks, and
we demonstrate the performance of our approach in simulation.
