Citation

Shi H, Li J, Li Z. Sensors (Basel) 2020; 20(6): e1606.

Affiliation

Key Laboratory of Wireless Power Transmission of Ministry of Education, University of Sichuan, 610065 Chengdu, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s20061606

PMID

32183107

Abstract

Searching multiple targets with swarm robots is a realistic and significant problem. The goal is to search the targets in the minimum time while avoiding collisions with other robots. In this paper, inspired by pedestrian behavior, swarm robotic pedestrian behavior (SRPB) was proposed. It considered many realistic constraints in the multi-target search problem, including limited communication range, limited working time, unknown sources, unknown extrema, the arbitrary initial location of robots, non-oriented search, and no central coordination. The performance of different cooperative strategies was evaluated in terms of average time to find the first, the half, and the last source, the number of located sources and the collision rate. Several experiments with different target signals, fixed initial location, arbitrary initial location, different population sizes, and the different number of targets were implemented. It was demonstrated by numerous experiments that SRPB had excellent stability, quick source seeking, a high number of located sources, and a low collision rate in various search strategies.

Language: en

Keywords

distributed strategy; multi-target search; pedestrian behavior; swarm intelligence; swarm robots