Swarm Robotics Search and Rescue: A Bee-Inspired Swarm Cooperation Approach without Information Exchange

Abstract

Swarm robotics plays a non-negligible role in actual practice because of its scalability and robustness. Besides some specific studies, there is still a lack of overall approaches to solving the search and rescue problem in a communication-denied environment. This paper presents a bee-inspired swarm cooperation approach without information exchange, including a target grouping method suitable for multi-objective and multi-robot, a finite behavior state machine, and the corresponding control law. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown via simulation. The overall approach proposed in this paper does not require two-way information exchange, and it is robust against relative and own position errors, making swarm robotics search and rescue in a communication-denied environment possible.