Bio-inspired coordination of multiple robots systems and stigmergy mechanims to cooperative exploration and surveillance tasks

Cooperative and distributed strategy is considered for a team of mobile robots to explore and patrol environments. The coordination strategy is based on modified version of the artificial ant system. The covered area is marked with amount of pheromone. The kind of pheromone causes repulsion of robots. They are directed to unexplored regions and the regions that were not recently explored for accomplishment cooperative tasks as exploration and surveillance. Previously, application of the strategy confirmed that exploration and surveillance general behaviors emerge from the individual agent behavior. The strategy is able to adapt the current system dynamics if the number of robots or the environment structure or both change. Three approaches relied on variation of pheromone releasing are presented for comparison as well as two mechanisms for steering adjusting. As performance criterion for patrolling, it is considered the time gap between two visits of the same region. Experiments results demonstrate that different configurations of strategies affect exploration and surveillance behaviors. The results show the performance of proposed approaches.