Bio-inspired strategies for the coordination of a swarm of robots in an unknown area

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of searching mines in an unknown area and disarming them in a cooperative manner. We describe two bio-inspired mechanisms that allow the robots to initiate the coordination with other robots when a mine is discovered. We model this problem as a multi-objective exploration and disarming problem. Specifically we propose a modified version of the Ant Colony Optimization (ATS-RR) and the Firefly Algorithm (FTS-RR). The proposed approaches have been implemented and evaluated in several simulated environments varying the parameter of the problems in term of team sizes, the number of mines disseminated in the area, the dimension of area. Our approaches have been implemented in simulation environments and have been compared with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The results demonstrate the efficiency of the FTS-RR over others.