Efficient quantitative assessment of robot swarms: coverage and targeting Lévy strategies

Biologically inspired have long been adapted to swarm robotic systems, including biased random walks, reaction to chemotactic cues and long-range coordination. In this paper we apply developed for modeling biological systems, such as continuum descriptions, to the efficient quantitative characteriza...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioinspiration & biomimetics 2022-03, Vol.17 (3), p.36006
Main Authors: Duncan, S, Estrada-Rodriguez, G, Stocek, J, Dragone, M, Vargas, P A, Gimperlein, H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
coverage
diffusion equation
Lévy walks
Movement
multi-agent systems
optimization
Robotics - methods
swarm robotics
target search
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Summary:Biologically inspired have long been adapted to swarm robotic systems, including biased random walks, reaction to chemotactic cues and long-range coordination. In this paper we apply developed for modeling biological systems, such as continuum descriptions, to the efficient quantitative characterization of robot swarms. As an illustration, both Brownian and Lévy strategies with a characteristic long-range movement are discussed. As a result we obtain computationally fast methods for the optimization of robot movement laws to achieve a prescribed collective behavior. We show how to compute performance metrics like coverage and hitting times, and illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach for area coverage and search problems. Comparisons between the continuum model and robotic simulations confirm the quantitative agreement and speed up by a factor of over 100 of our approach. Results confirm and quantify the advantage of Lévy strategies over Brownian motion for search and area coverage problems in swarm robotics.
ISSN:1748-3182
1748-3190
DOI:10.1088/1748-3190/ac57f0