Collective Mapping of Gas Leakages to Determine Safe Routes Using Multi-Robot System

摘要

This article discusses a novel approach to collective mapping that uses autonomous sensors to create safe routes in environments with gas leaks. Multiple mobile sensors seek to delimit different regions and assign them different tasks according to their momentary needs. In this study, robot groups act as multiple composite sensors that can move independently according to their assigned functions. Autonomous detection, collective mapping, and collective decision-making of the robots are behaviors bioinspired by the cognitive mechanisms observed in bacterial colonies. These colonies continuously seek to maintain the lives of their species based on their collective decision-making in searching for energy sources and changing colony size. In addition, as gas dispersion in the environment increases, the received data from the sensors aids collective decision-making, assigning different functions, such as mapping, environment exploration, and route creation, to groups of mobile sensors. Depending on the momentary need, the number of sensors in each group changes. The proposed method in this study was based on real mobile robots with characteristics that enable varying levels of scalability in size. Subsequently, it was evaluated in a simulated system and developed for experimentation with gas and mobile sensors in a dynamic and realistic environment. This study further contributes to analyzing multiple tasks in homogeneous sensor groups executing different tasks. Furthermore, this work introduced a simulated experimental system to test different topologies of multiple scalable mobile sensors.