Insect-Inspired Robot Coordination: Foraging and Coverage

Abstract

In this paper we investigate coordination principles inspired by the behaviour of honeybees and ants for coordination pur-poses in multi-robot systems. Specifically, we study the prob-lem instances of bee-inspired robot Foraging and ant-inspired robot Coverage, where Foraging is the problem of exploring the environment in search of food or provisions and Coverage is the problem of deploying a robotic swarm in the environ-ment with the task of maximising the sensor coverage of the environment. To effectively and efficiently solve both prob-lems, distributed multi-robot coordination is required. For the first problem we investigate a bee-inspired solution method. The second problem is studied using a stigmergic approach. In an extensive set of experiments we first study the feasibility of the proposed multi-robot coordination for robotic swarms with extended resources and discuss the benefits and limita-tions of using these swarms. Furthermore, as the downsizing in swarm robotics becomes increasingly important with on-going miniaturization in various applications, the feasibility of the proposed coordination techniques for robotic swarms with limited resources is studied in detail; the practical re-quirements for overcoming the limitations of these swarms are introduced and the main need to incorporate these robots in real world experiments is discussed.