Glowworm-inspired robot swarm for simultaneous taxis towards multiple radiation sources

Krishnanand, KN and Amruth, P and Guruprasad, MH and Bidargaddi, Sharschchandra V and Ghose, Debasish (2006) Glowworm-inspired robot swarm for simultaneous taxis towards multiple radiation sources. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),, May 15-19, 2006, Orlando, FL, pp. 958-963.

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Abstract

This paper presents a glowworm metaphor based distributed algorithm that enables a collection of minimalist mobile robots to split into subgroups, exhibit simultaneous taxis-behavior towards, and rendezvous at multiple radiation sources such as nuclear/hazardous chemical spills and fire-origins in a fire calamity. The algorithm is based on a glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) technique that finds multiple optima of multimodal functions. The algorithm is in the same spirit as the ant-colony optimization (ACO) algorithms, but with several significant differences. The agents in the glowworm algorithm carry a luminescence quantity called luciferin along with them. Agents are thought of as glowworms that emit a light whose intensity is proportional to the associated luciferin. The key feature that is responsible for the working of the algorithm is the use of an adaptive local-decision domain, which we use effectively to detect the multiple source locations of interest. The glowworms have a finite sensor range which defines a hard limit on the local-decision domain used to compute their movements. Extensive simulations validate the feasibility of applying the glowworm algorithm to the problem of multiple source localization. We build four wheeled robots called glowworms to conduct our experiments. We use a preliminary experiment to demonstrate the basic behavioral primitives that enable each glowworm to exhibit taxis behavior towards source locations and later demonstrate a sound localization task using a set of four glowworms.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Series.:	IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copyright 2006 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Aerospace Engineering(Formerly Aeronautical Engineering)
Date Deposited:	26 Aug 2010 05:35
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 06:12
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/30711

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