Bio-inspired artificial pheromone system for swarm robotics applications

Abstract

Pheromones are chemical substances released into the environment by an individual animal, which elicit stereotyped behaviours widely found across the animal kingdom. Inspired by the effective use of pheromones in social insects, pheromonal communication has been adopted to swarm robotics domain using diverse approaches such as alcohol, RFID tags and light. COSΦ is one of the light-based artificial pheromone systems which can emulate realistic pheromones and environment properties through the system. This article provides a significant improvement to the state-of-the-art by proposing a novel artificial pheromone system that simulates pheromones with environmental effects by adopting a model of spatio-temporal development of pheromone derived from a flow of fluid in nature. Using the proposed system, we investigated the collective behaviour of a robot swarm in a bio-inspired aggregation scenario, where robots aggregated on a circular pheromone cue with different environmental factors, that is, diffusion and pheromone shift. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed pheromone system for use in swarm robotic applications.

Soft robotics: the route to true robotic organisms

“…However, each robot still requires the capability to locally compute and undertake reactive control tasks. To partially overcome this limitation, computation can be devolved to the environment: by exploiting chemical message passing-akin to ant pheromones-, memory, control and population-level behaviours can be realised [14].…”

Self-Organised Collision-Free Flocking Mechanism in Heterogeneous Robot Swarms

“…The expected flocking performance is the group of robots collectively move along the track of the leader. To evaluate the group motion, we used two metrics which have commonly used in swarm robotics area [25,29,47,48]: d s and ξ . These two metrics were calculated and recorded at each sampling time during every experiment.…”

“…Moreover, a flocking mechanisms was proposed in [28] using magnitude-dependent motion control to steer a swarm. In a recent study, Na et al [29] presented a bioinspired collective migration of a swarm that were steered by movement of an external cue embodied in an artificial pheromone. In a seminal study in collective motion, Ferrante et al [30] proposed a flocking method based on active elastic sheet (AES), which is a self-propelled mechanism where swarm particles can successfully achieve collective motions.…”

Phormica: Photochromic Pheromone Release and Detection System for Stigmergic Coordination in Robot Swarms

“…A number of researchers have proposed different approaches in which an external infrastructure is used to partially or completely store the stigmergic information. For instance, the movement of robots is tracked using an overhead camera and the pheromone trails are then either projected on the ground (Hamann et al, 2007 ; Garnier et al, 2013 ; Hunt et al, 2019 ; Talamali et al, 2020 ) or displayed on LCD screens that serve as the floor on which the robots move (Arvin et al, 2015 ; Na et al, 2019 , 2020 ). The robots can detect the projected pheromone trails locally using their sensors, for then acting accordingly.…”