Probabilistic Presence Density Control for Areal Wide-area Distributed Exploration with Swarm Robots

Abstract

Swarm robotics have been studied actively in recent years for planetary explorations，inspections of construction sites，and so on．However，there are few effective algorithms for swarm robots．We propose a distributed exploration system with multiple heterogeneous small robots with low loss cost per robot，and a probabilistic distribution algorithm for wide-area exploration of swarm robots．In the simulation of the probabilistic control algorithm，the robots can repeatedly and uniformly explore an area near an arbitrary distribution center due to their probabilistic behavior，and the area size and density of exploration can be controlled by simple parameters．Simulations showed that the robot swarm follows the proposed control according to the set proposed distribution．In addition，a comparison of the observation efficiency with conventional rovers showed that the robot swarm with the proposed swarm control algorithm has superior observation efficiency．