Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article

A Bioinspired Coordination Strategy for Controlling of Multiple Robots in Surveillance Tasks

Authors:
Rodrigo Calvo
Janderson Rodrigo de Oliveira
Mauricio Figueiredo
Roseli Aparecida Francelin Romero

Keywords: multiple robot system; surveillance task; coordination strategy; ant colony system; swarm systems.

Abstract:
There are tasks that the multiple agent system approach is very appropriate for improving performance. Among them are: environment exploration, mineral mining, mine sweeping, surveillance, and rescue operations. The expected advantage is not a mere consequence of putting together many agents. An efficient coordination strategy is decisive to reach performance improvements. In the present paper, a new strategy is proposed for coordination of multiple robot systems applied to exploration and surveillance tasks. The coordination strategy is distributed and on-line. It is inspired in biological mechanisms that define the social organization of swarm systems; specifically, it is based on a modified version of usual artificial ant systems. Two versions of the proposal are evaluated. The experiments consider two performance criteria: the average of the numbers of surveillance epochs and average of the surveillance time intervals. Simulation results confirm that exploration and surveillance emerge from a synergy of individual robot behaviors. Data analyses show the coordination strategy is effective and suitable to execute exploration and surveillance tasks.

Pages: 146 to 165

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628