Easily scalable algorithms for dispersing autonomous robots

Abstract

This paper describes three new algorithms for dispersing a swarm of bots throughout a search space. We assume that the bots do not have a central coordinating agent and we want to have no (or few) inter-bot communications so that the algorithms can scale to large swarm sizes. We simulated the three new dispersion algorithms plus two other random-walk based dispersion algorithms on five different search spaces. Each of the five algorithms was tested with swarm sizes from three to fifty bots. For swarm sizes larger than ten, we found that the minimize-intensity algorithm, which is based on decaying signal strengths, worked best. For small swarm sizes, the dispersion algorithm based on the dispersion of gas particles performed best.