Ant-based distributed protocol for coordination of a swarm of robots in demining mission

Abstract

Coordination among multiple robots has been extensively studied, since a number of practical real problem s can be performed using an effective approach. In this paper is investigated a collective task that requires a multi-robot system to search for randomly distributed mines in an unknown environment and disarm them cooperatively. The communication among the swarm of robots influences the overall performance in terms of time to execute the task or consumed energy. To address this problem, a new distributed recruiting protocol to coordinate a swarm of robots in demining mission, is described. This problem is a multi-objective problem and two bio inspired strategies are used. The novelty of this approach lies in the combination of direct and indirect communication: on one hand an indirect communication among robots is used for the exploration of the environment, on the other hand a novel protocol is used to accomplish the recruiting and coordination of the robots for demining task. This protocol attempts to tackle the question of how autonomous robot can coordinate themselves into an unknown environment relying on simple low-level capabilities. The strategy is able to adapt the current system dynamics if the number of robots or the environment structure or both change. The proposed approach has been implemented and has been evaluated in several simulated environments. We analyzed the impact of our approach in the overall performance of a robot team. Experimental results indicated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed protocol to spread the robots in the environment.