A model for terrain coverage inspired by ant's alarm pheromones

Abstract

When looking at science and technology today, we find a recurrent problem to many fields: how to cover a search space consistently and uniformly. This problem is encountered in robotics (searching for targets), optimization (searching for solutions), mathematics and computer science (graph traversals), and even in software engineering (the main motivation for this research). In insect societies, and in particular ant colonies, one can find the concept of alarm pheromones used to indicate an important event to the society (e.g. a threat). Alarm pheromones enable the society to have a uniform spread of its individuals, probably as a survival mechanism --- the more uniform the spread the better the changes of survival at the colony level. This paper proposes a model of this ant behavior which can be used to solve the aforementioned problem. The model, called ALARM is inspired primarily by ACO and from observations of ants alarm behavior. We compare the model with a random walk, to demonstrate a significant improvement over this approach.