Robotic Surveillance Based on the Meeting Time of Random Walks

Duan, Xiaoming; George, Mishel; Patel, Rushabh; Bullo, Francesco

doi:10.1109/tro.2020.2990362

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The costs of additional nodes include the loss of ants from the trail, and the pursuit of fruitless paths, which may detract from the colony’s ability to distribute resources among its many nests, and make fewer ants available to recruit effectively when a new food source is discovered. In addition, each node provides opportunities for encounters with other, competing species traveling in the same vegetation [68, 69, 70, 58]. Our results here suggest that, as in engineered networks [71, 72], the cost of including a node in the turtle ant network may vary among nodes, because whether other ants follow an exploring ant that leaves the trail at that node depends on the node’s physical configuration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Because ants explore edges not reinforced by pheromone, each node presents an opportunity for ants to get lost, and lost ants may lay pheromone trail that could lead other ants astray. Each node is also an opportunity to intersect with the network of a competing colony [58] in the same vegetation. Maximizing the probability that successive ants take the same trajectory through a node. This objective contributes to the creation and maintenance of a coherent trail.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The costs of additional nodes include the loss of ants from the trail, and the pursuit of fruitless paths, which may detract from the colony's ability to distribute resources among its many nests, and make fewer ants available to recruit effectively when a new food source is discovered. In addition, each node provides opportunities for encounters with other, competing species traveling in the same vegetation [66,67,68,54]. Further work is needed to examine variation among colonies [69] in how well they minimize the number of nodes, to learn how selection may shape the process that determines how a trail network is constructed and maintained.…”

Section: Turtle Ants Form Loops To Promote Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…where distributed agents must coordinate in complex environments using a communication backbone to explore new terrain, exploit of temporary resources, and maintain security against intruders [54]. Networks were mapped using the same methods as in previous work [49], using visual inspection of the paths the ants took through the vegetation at a rate of at least 10 ants per 15 min.…”

Section: Turtle Ants Form Loops To Promote Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Better tired than lost: turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges

Chandrasekhar

Marshall

Austin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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1To create and maintain a backbone routing network is a basic challenge in many engineered and 2 biological systems [1][2][3], from wireless sensor networks and robot swarms to neural circuits 3 and blood circulation. Optimal routing in such networks often seeks to minimize transport 4 delay [4][5][6][7][8], but routing decisions may be influenced by variability in the terrain [9][10][11][12]. Here 5 we find that turtle ants build trail networks that emphasize coherence, keeping the ants together 6 on the trail in a heterogeneous environment, rather than minimizing the distance travelled. The 7 routing backbone of turtle ants (Cephalotes goniodontus), an arboreal species that forages in the 8 1 tree canopy of tropical forests, connects many nests [13][14][15], using trail pheromone that the ants 9 put down continuously, not just on the way back from a food source. Unlike species that forage 10 on the ground, arboreal ants are constrained to travel within the vegetation network of branches 11 and vines. We compared observed turtle ant trails with random, hypothetical trails in the same 12 surrounding vegetation. Strikingly, the trails do not minimize distance travelled, but instead 13 minimize the total number of nodes in the backbone, and favor nodes with 3d configurations 14 that are easily reinforced with pheromone. Thus, rather than forming the shortest paths, turtle 15 ants take advantage of natural variation in the environment to build coherent trails. This ensures 16 that the nests and food sources stay connected, at the expense of longer travel time. This design 17 principle may be beneficial in applications where distributed agents, such as swarms of robots, 18 must coordinate using a communication backbone in complex environments to collectively 19 solve a task, such as building a structure, searching for resources, or surveying terrain [16]. 20 Introduction 21The goal of a backbone routing network is to ensure that there is a path for any two 22 devices on the network to communicate. In real-world systems, however, physical variation in the 23 environment can affect the accuracy and rate of communication [9][10][11][12][17][18][19]. Understanding the 24 physical structure of the environment may improve the design of routing algorithms [16,[20][21][22][23][24], for 25 example, by reducing the search space of possible routing paths and steering network construction 26 away from parts of the terrain that are difficult to reach. 27The 14,000 species of ants have evolved diverse distributed routing and search algorithms to 28 search for, obtain, and distribute resources [25] in the diverse environments that they inhabit [26-29 29]. For example, species such as Formica and Argentine ants, which forage and build trails in 30 a 2d-plane, have minimal constraints on trail geometry [30][31][32], and can minimize the distance 31 travelled by forming trails with branch points that approximate Steiner trees [27, 33, 34], an NP-32 complete generalization of the minimal spanning tree concept. By contrast, many specie...

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