Multi-robot hunting using mobile agents

Abstract

Multi-robot hunting problem is one of the popular issues treated with multi-robot systems. The purpose of the problem is to search and capture a target using an invisible signal, through which the multirobots can sense the distance to the target. This paper proposes a new method in which the multiple robots cooperatively search for a target using mobile agents. In the method, we employ multiple mobile software agents. The mobile agents traverse mobile robots through migrations while collecting the information of the target. Since each robot just needs to establish a connection with another robot for migration of a mobile agent, our method reduces the total communication cost of the system. Also, the mobile agents’ migration manner is restricted within the view range of the camera of a robot, and thus mainly makes robots around the target active, which contributes to suppressing moving cost. We have implemented a simulator for the mobile agents based hunting system. We show the effectiveness of our method through numerical experiments on the simulator.