Swarm robotics in wireless distributed protocol design for coordinating robots involved in cooperative tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized swarm robotics protocol inspired by ant behavior for efficient mine detection and disarming in unknown areas, demonstrating promising simulation results for cooperative task coordination.

Contribution

It presents a novel ant-inspired swarm protocol for cooperative mine detection, integrating exploration and recruitment strategies, validated through extensive simulations.

Findings

Decentralized swarm approach effectively coordinates robots without central control.

Simulation results show reduced exploration and recruitment times.

The protocol adapts well to different network and field conditions.

Abstract

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.