Path Planning Strategies Inspired By Swarm Behaviour of Plant Root Apexes

Abstract

In this research, we modeled a root swarm system based on simple agents and used its principles to design a swarm robotic controller. The root model was optimised as a multi-agent system with several goals and tasks. In our case, these tasks are the simultaneous exploration and exploitation of the resources present in the soil where the root lives and grows. Using a bottom-up approach we obtained control structures for individual apexes, that when cloned on all apexes can reproduce biologically plausible global root patterns. Finally, we directly employed these control structures optimised in the context of biological systems to implement the exploratory behaviour of a swarm of robots. In this sense, our study goes beyond vague biological inspiration into direct application of the exploration strategy used by the biological system to the engineering application. The inherent risk of failure of such a direct transfer is theoretically mitigated by millions of years of evolution of the root exploration strategies; in practice, the results from this study confirm the applicability and efficiency of this algorithm.