Swarm robotics in wireless distributed protocol design for coordinating robots involved in cooperative tasks
This addresses the problem of efficient mine clearance for safety applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing stigmergy and swarm approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of mine detection in an unexplored area by proposing a decentralized swarm robotics strategy based on ant behavior to coordinate robots for exploration and disarming, with simulation results showing it enables cooperative tasks without central control.
The mine detection in an unexplored area is an optimization problem where multiple mines, randomly distributed throughout an area, need to be discovered and disarmed in a minimum amount of time. We propose a strategy to explore an unknown area, using a stigmergy approach based on ants behavior, and a novel swarm based protocol to recruit and coordinate robots for disarming the mines cooperatively. Simulation tests are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed Ant-based Task Robot Coordination (ATRC) with only the exploration task and with both exploration and recruiting strategies. Multiple minimization objectives have been considered: the robots' recruiting time and the overall area exploration time. We discuss, through simulation, different cases under different network and field conditions, performed by the robots. The results have shown that the proposed decentralized approaches enable the swarm of robots to perform cooperative tasks intelligently without any central control.