Cooperative Pollution Source Localization and Cleanup with a Bio-inspired Swarm Robot Aggregation
This work addresses safety in extreme environments for human operators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing bio-inspired methods.
The paper tackles the problem of locating and cleaning chemical leaks in hazardous environments using a bio-inspired swarm robot system, demonstrating feasibility through simulation experiments with Mona robots.
Using robots for exploration of extreme and hazardous environments has the potential to significantly improve human safety. For example, robotic solutions can be deployed to find the source of a chemical leakage and clean the contaminated area. This paper demonstrates a proof-of-concept bio-inspired exploration method using a swarm robotic system, which is based on a combination of two bio-inspired behaviours: aggregation, and pheromone tracking. The main idea of the work presented is to follow pheromone trails to find the source of a chemical leakage and then carry out a decontamination task by aggregating at the critical zone. Using experiments conducted by a simulated model of a Mona robot, we evaluate the effects of population size and robot speed on the ability of the swarm in a decontamination task. The results indicate the feasibility of deploying robotic swarms in an exploration and cleaning task in an extreme environment.