Control over Swarm Robots Search with Swarm Intelligence Principles

Abstract

Swarm robots possess the potential to save lives by providing the rescuers location of victim during the most critical early hours in coal mine disaster areas. Robot and its controller as an inertial element and modeled such distributed system at an abstract level were viewed according to the swarm intelligence principles,which used a virtual multi-agents search to locate the target in a closed 2-D space. The control over robots was attributed to two kinds:moving spirally to search for cues and extending particle swarm optimization to search for target. The former is to offer evidence for the latter working. Then the definitions of sensing function,neighborhood structure and initiating area of robots were given. Taking the limited sense ability and local interaction mechanism into account,the properties of the system were obtained by changing different parameters such as number of robots,communication range and sense scope in simulating experiment. The simulation results indicate validity of the control strategy.