A Pheromone-Inspired Monitoring Strategy Using a Swarm of Underwater Robots

Abstract

The advent of the swarm makes it feasible to dynamically monitor a wide area for maritime applications. The crucial problems of underwater swarm monitoring are communication and behavior coordination. To tackle these problems, we propose a wide area monitoring strategy that searches for static targets of interest simultaneously. Traditionally, an underwater robot adopts either acoustic communication or optical communication. However, the former is low in bandwidth and the latter is short in communication range. Our strategy coordinates underwater robots through indirect communication, which is inspired by social insects that exchange information by pheromone. The indirect communication is established with the help of a set of underwater communication nodes. We adopt a virtual pheromone-based controller and provide a set of rules to integrate the area of interest into the pheromone. Based on the information in the virtual pheromone, behavior laws are developed to guide the swarm to monitor and search with nearby information. In addition, a robot can improve its performance when using additional far-away pheromone information. The monitoring strategy is further improved by adopting a swarm evolution scheme which automatically adjusts the visiting period. Experimental results show that our strategy is superior to the random strategy in most cases.

Swarm Metaverse for Multi-Level Autonomy Using Digital Twins

“…Pheromones have also been used as a bio-inspired mechanism for swarm control via environmental signals [ 26 , 27 ]. Pheromones can be inserted in the environment by swarm members as a form of information exchange or by a human operator.…”

“…Previous studies have only used pheromones in fully autonomous swarms with no human interventions. Additionally, it has been shown that pheromones do not scale well with swarm size [ 27 ]. Kim et al [ 28 ] studied chemotaxis control, where a chemical source is placed in the environment to guide the swarm members.…”

“…Kolling et al found that the performance of control via beacons was inferior to the case where the supervisor directly selects a sub-swarm to execute the command. Pheromones have also been used as a bio-inspired mechanism for swarm control via environmental signals [26,27]. Pheromones can be inserted in the environment by swarm members as a form of information exchange or by a human operator.…”

A Comprehensive Review of Coverage Path Planning in Robotics Using Classical and Heuristic Algorithms

“…Each robot is considered a particle whose motion is controlled by signals in the environment. In [47], pheromone-based communication [48] is utilized to control multi-robots and the LF search strategy is implemented to improve the efficiency of searching and coverage in an unknown environment. Whereas [49] proposed gradient following combined with the LF approach using a virtual pheromone-based model in the control to provide better performance in area coverage.…”