抄録
With the ability to handle critical but dangerous tasks instead of human, robot swarms have been regarded as one of the emerging fields in robotics research. One of the major topics is how to locate various types of sources with swarms of mobile robots. This paper presents a simple yet efficient decentralized algorithm for swarm mobile robots to localize odor sources based on local odor intensity. Swarm mobile robots with generally limited sensing range and communication capability relocate themselves independently based on the gradient of local odor intensity and coverage of the area within their limited sensing range. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized algorithm enables swarms of mobile robots to localize distributed odor sources efficiently even in situation where multiple odor sources exist. This algorithm does not only provide simplicity but also efficiency, as it requires less computation cost and improves the convergence time significantly compared to the Voronoi-based algorithm.
