Swarm robots search when local sense and interactions

Abstract

Swarm robots possess the potential to save lives by providing the rescuers location of victim during the most critical early hours. The ongoing project of swarm robots for search victim in coal mine disaster areas focuses on the modeling approach and control policies. This paper modeled such distributed system at an abstract level according to the swarm intelligence principles, i.e., limited sense capacity of individuals and local interaction mechanism, which used a virtual multiple agents search to localize target in a closed 2-D space. So, key definitions such as sensing function, neighborhood structure and initialization zone were given. The control over robots was attributed to two types: spiral control globally to search for signal cues and swarm intelligence-based control to search for target locally. Robots moving spirally to search cues can offer evidence for using swarm intelligence algorithm to search target. Taking characteristics of robots into account, we obtained the properties of the system by changing different parameters including communication range and sense scope in experiment. The simulation results indicate the validity of the control strategy proposed.