Towards quorum sensing based distributed control for networks of mobile sensors

Control and communication for a distributed network of robotic agents is a difficult problem to solve at the microscale. In nature, bacteria utilize chemical signaling to execute controlled movement, communication, and collaborative task completion. Chemotactic response (i.e. biased random walk of bacteria towards a chemo-attractant source) enables effective sensing and creates a biased distribution of bacteria in a field. Quorum sensing allows a robust collective response to be achieved at specific bacteria number densities. In this work, we present a computational model for bio-inspired sensing, communication, and control that is based on the combination of chemotaxis and quorum sensing. We have computationally demonstrated that these bio-inspired strategies can be implemented in synthetic mobile sensor network. Robustness and response time of such systems are also examined.