Mobility Control Exploiting Swarm Intelligence for Mobile Sensing Searching for Indistinguishable Multiple Targets

Abstract

In mobile sensing where autonomous mobile robots equipped with diverse types of sensors perform sensing operations over a sensing field, the number and positions of sensing targets can be unknown, therefore, robots need to search for sensing targets by themselves. In order to realize an efficient search with a group of robots, this paper introduces an algorithm called mobile sensing cluster, where robots form a swarm with data exchange through wireless communications. We focus on a scenario where mobile sensing cluster is applied to search for multiple targets emitting indistinguishable signals, e.g., search for gas sources. In this case, it becomes difficult for mobile robots to decide appropriate directions to move toward individual targets. In this paper, we propose algorithms for mobile robots to efficiently search for these indistinguishable multiple targets, and investigate their search efficiency by computer simulations.