A stigmergetic method based on vector pheromone for target search with swarm robots

Abstract

Stigmergy is a common social network mechanism in nature, which allows individuals to achieve effective coordination through the environment, and has shown some successful applications on robotic systems. This paper proposes a stigmergetic target search method based on vector pheromone for swarm robots. Robots generate vector pheromones according to the target signal and release them to the environment for other robots to read, so as to achieve the indirect transfer of information. The method is extended from our previous work which has some shortcoming especially in the updating process of pheromones. This paper improves the previous search method by designing a hybrid pheromone updating rule to achieve more efficient and accurate information exchange. Moreover, the improved search method contains a robot navigation algorithm and a pheromone map building algorithm for guiding robots’ motion and building the pheromone map. Numerical experiments are performed to compare the performance of the improved method with the previous one. Results show that the improved method can enhance the robot’s efficiency and success rate in finding the static and dynamic targets. Meanwhile, it can also improve the speed of map building and the accuracy of the pheromone map.