Ant System with Negative Feedback for bushfire fighting with swarm robots

The use of a swarm of autonomous robots for bushfire fighting is studied in this work. A novel distributed and behavioral control strategy, the Ant System with Negative Feedback (ASNF), is proposed. Inspired by real ants behavior under crowded conditions, ASNF differs from existing ant based algorithms by introducing a new pheromone, the Crowded Pheromone (CP), into the algorithmic framework. In ASNF, an ant traveling on a overcrowded path deposits crowded pheromone on its path, which will diverts other ants to paths with better traffic situations. The efficiency of the whole group is then enhanced. The ASNF is evaluated in simulations of bushfire fighting scenarios comprising of one hundred swarm robots. It is shown that swarm robots using ASNF are able to locate and extinguish fire efficiently in unknown environments.