Bio-inspired robot swarm control algorithm for dynamic environment monitoring

To monitor the environment and determine the source of a pollutant gradient using a multiple robot swarm, we propose a hybrid algorithm that combines two bio-inspired algorithms mimicking chemotaxis and pheromones of bacteria. The algorithm is implemented in virtual robot agents in a simulator to evaluate their feasibility and efficiency in gradient maps with different sizes. Simulation results show that the chemotaxis controller guided robot agents to the locations with higher pollutant concentrations, while the pheromone marked in a virtual field increased the efficiency of the search by reducing the visiting redundancy. The number of steps required to reach the target point did not increase proportionally as the map size increased, but were less than those in the linear whole-map search method. Furthermore, the robot agents could function with simple sensor composition, minimum information about the map, and low calculation capacity.