On a bio-inspired hybrid pheromone signalling for efficient map exploration of multiple mobile service robots

This paper presents a novel bio-inspired hybrid communication framework that incorporates the repelling behaviour of anti-aphrodisiac pheromones and attractive behaviour of pheromones for efficient map exploration of multiple mobile service robots. The proposed communication framework presents a scheme for robots to efficiently serve large areas of map, while cooperating with each other through proper pheromone deposition. This eliminates the need of explicitly programming each service robot to serve particular areas of the map. The paths taken by robots are represented as nodes across which pheromones are deposited. This reduces the search space for tracking pheromones and reduces data size to be communicated between robots. A novel pheromone deposition model is presented which takes into account the uncertainty in the robot’s position. This eliminates robots to deposit pheromones at wrong places when localization fails. The framework also integrates the pheromone signalling mechanism in landmark-based Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) localization and allows the robots to capture areas or sub-areas of the map, to improve the localization. A scheme to resolve conflicts through local communication is presented. We discuss, through experimental and simulation results, two cases of floor cleaning task, and surveillance task, performed by multiple robots. Results show that the proposed scheme enables multiple service robots to perform cooperative tasks intelligently without any explicit programming.