A Hybrid ACO/PSO Control Algorithm for Distributed Swarm Robots

In this paper, we present a hybrid ant colony optimization/particle swarm optimization (ACO/PSO) control algorithm for distributed swarm robots, where each robot can only communicate with its neighbors within its communication range. A virtual pheromone mechanism is proposed as the message passing coordination scheme among the robots. This hybrid ACO/PSO architecture adopts the feedback mechanism from environment of ACO and the adaptive interplay among agents of PSO to create a dynamic optimization system, and it is well-suited for a large scale distributed multi-agent system under dynamic environments. Furthermore, a pheromone-edge pair propagation funneling method is developed to reduce the communication overhead among robots. The simulation results concretely demonstrate the robustness, scalability, and individual simplicity of the proposed control architecture in a swarm robot system with real-world constraints