Title: Swarm robotics in wireless distributed protocol design for coordinating robots involved in cooperative tasks,
Abstract: The mine detection in an unexplored area is an optimization problem where
multiple mines, randomly distributed throughout an area, need to be discovered
and disarmed in a minimum amount of time. We propose a strategy to explore an
unknown area, using a stigmergy approach based on ants behavior, and a novel
swarm based protocol to recruit and coordinate robots for disarming the mines
cooperatively. Simulation tests are presented to show the effectiveness of our
proposed Ant-based Task Robot Coordination (ATRC) with only the exploration
task and with both exploration and recruiting strategies. Multiple minimization
objectives have been considered: the robots' recruiting time and the overall
area exploration time. We discuss, through simulation, different cases under
different network and field conditions, performed by the robots. The results
have shown that the proposed decentralized approaches enable the swarm of
robots to perform cooperative tasks intelligently without any central control.