Swarm Crawler Robots Using Lévy Flight for Targets Exploration in Large Environments

Abstract

This study tackles the task of swarm robotics, where robots explore the environment to detect targets. When a robot detects a target, the robot must be connected with a base station via intermediate relay robots for wireless communication. Our previous results confirmed that Lévy flight outperformed the usual random walk for exploration strategy in an indoor environment. This paper investigated the search performance of swarm crawler robots with Lévy flight on target detection problems in large environments through a series of real robots’ experiments. The results suggest that the swarm crawler robots with Lévy flight succeeded in the target’s discovery in the indoor environment with a 100% success rate, and were able to find several targets in a given time in the outdoor environment. Thus, we confirmed that target exploration in a large environment would be possible by crawler robots with Lévy flight and significant variances in the detection rate among the positions to detect the outdoor environment’s target.