Abstract
Using robots for exploration of extreme and hazardous environments has the potential to significantly improve human safety. For example, robotic solutions can be deployed to find the source of a chemical leakage and clean the contaminated area. This paper demonstrates a proof-of-concept bio-inspired exploration method using a swarm robotic system based on a combination of two bio-inspired behaviors: aggregation, and pheromone tracking. The main idea of the work presented is to follow pheromone trails to find the source of a chemical leakage and then carry out a decontamination task by aggregating at the critical zone. Using experiments conducted by a simulated model of a Mona robot, the effects of population size and robot speed on the ability of the swarm was evaluated in a decontamination task. The results indicate the feasibility of deploying robotic swarms in an exploration and cleaning task in an extreme environment.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by OP VVV project Research Center for Informatics, code CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000765, and the UK EPSRC projects RAIN (EP/R026084/1) and RNE (EP/P01366X/1).
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Sadeghi Amjadi, A., Raoufi, M., Turgut, A.E., Broughton, G., Krajník, T., Arvin, F. (2021). Cooperative Pollution Source Exploration and Cleanup with a Bio-inspired Swarm Robot Aggregation. In: Gao, H., Wang, X., Iqbal, M., Yin, Y., Yin, J., Gu, N. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 350. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67540-0_30
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