Multi-Robot Coverage: A Bee Pheromone Signalling Approach

In this paper we propose BeePCo, a multi-robot coverage approach based on honey bee colony behaviour. Specifically, we propose a honey bee inspired pheromone signalling method that allows a team of robots to maximise the total area covered in an environment in a distributed manner. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is experimentally evaluated on three different sizes of multi robot systems (MRSs) and compared against an ant-inspired coverage algorithm (StiCo) to show the different characteristics of these two approaches.

[1]  Nikolaus Correll,et al.  Collective Inspection of Regular Structures using a Swarm of Miniature Robots , 2004, ISER.

[2]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Experimental Robotics IV, The 4th International Symposium, Stanford, California, USA, June 30 - July 2, 1995 , 1997, ISER.

[3]  Douglas W. Gage,et al.  Command Control for Many-Robot Systems , 1992 .

[4]  Leandro Soares Indrusiak,et al.  Runtime optimisation in WSNs for load balancing using pheromone signalling , 2012, 2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Networked Embedded Systems for Every Application (NESEA).

[5]  D. Karaboga,et al.  On the performance of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm , 2008, Appl. Soft Comput..

[6]  Dervis Karaboga,et al.  Artificial bee colony algorithm , 2010, Scholarpedia.

[7]  Ann Nowé,et al.  Bee Behaviour in Multi-agent Systems , 2007, Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agents Systems.

[8]  M. B. V. Roberts,et al.  Biology: A Functional Approach , 1987 .

[9]  Amir Pirzadeh,et al.  A unified solution to coverage and search in explored and unexplored terrains using indirect control , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Tracking Targets Using Multiple Robots: The Effect of Environment Occlusion , 2002, Auton. Robots.

[11]  Eli Packer,et al.  Robust geometric computing and optimal visibility coverage , 2008 .

[12]  C. Phillips,et al.  Biological Task Mapping and Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications Technology and Applications.

[13]  Leandro Soares Indrusiak,et al.  Bioinspired Load Balancing in Large-Scale WSNs Using Pheromone Signalling , 2013, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[14]  T. Bokareva,et al.  SASHA: toward a self-healing hybrid sensor network architecture , 2005, The Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, 2005. EmNetS-II..

[15]  Jindong Tan,et al.  Distributed multi-robot coordination in area exploration , 2006, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[16]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  AntNet: Distributed Stigmergetic Control for Communications Networks , 1998, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[17]  Elon Rimon,et al.  Spanning-tree based coverage of continuous areas by a mobile robot , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[18]  Wendi Heinzelman,et al.  Energy-efficient communication protocol for wireless microsensor networks , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[19]  Jun Zhang,et al.  Ant routing optimization algorithm for extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[20]  Leandro Soares Indrusiak,et al.  Using mobile robotic agents to increase service availability and extend network lifetime on WSRNs , 2014, 2014 12th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN).

[21]  Nasser A. El-Sherbeny,et al.  Vehicle routing with time windows: An overview of exact, heuristic and metaheuristic methods , 2010 .

[22]  Peter Stone,et al.  A multi-robot system for continuous area sweeping tasks , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[23]  Noam Hazon,et al.  On redundancy, efficiency, and robustness in coverage for multiple robots , 2008, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[24]  Libor Preucil,et al.  European Robotics Symposium 2008 , 2008 .

[25]  Imed Bouazizi,et al.  ARA-the ant-colony based routing algorithm for MANETs , 2002, Proceedings. International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshop.

[26]  Mohamed G. Gouda,et al.  Accelerated heartbeat protocols , 1998, Proceedings. 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (Cat. No.98CB36183).

[27]  Elon Rimon,et al.  Competitive on-line coverage of grid environments by a mobile robot , 2003, Comput. Geom..

[28]  Gerhard Weiss,et al.  StiCo in action , 2013, AAMAS.

[29]  Subir Kumar Sarkar,et al.  Trust Based Secure and Energy Efficient Clustering in Wireless Sensor Network: A Bee Mating Approach , 2013, PReMI.

[30]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  An Artificial Immune System for Misbehavior Detection in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks with Virtual Thymus, Clustering, Danger Signal and Memory Detectors , 2004, Int. J. Unconv. Comput..

[31]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Spreading Out: A Local Approach to Multi-robot Coverage , 2002, DARS.

[32]  Seth Hutchinson,et al.  Barrier Coverage: Deploying Robot Guards to Prevent Intrusion , 2008 .

[33]  Muddassar Farooq,et al.  BeeSensor: A Bee-Inspired Power Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, EvoWorkshops.

[34]  Slavi ˘ Sarafijanovicand.  An Artificial Immune System Approach With Secondary Response for Misbehavior Detection in Mobile ad hoc Networks , 2005 .

[35]  Özgür B. Akan,et al.  Immune System Based Distributed Node and Rate Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2006, 2006 1st Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information and Computing Systems.

[36]  O. Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1985, Proceedings. 1985 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[37]  Anthony Stentz,et al.  Multi-robot exploration controlled by a market economy , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[38]  Yue Zhang,et al.  BeeHive: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm Inspired by Honey Bee Behavior , 2004, ANTS Workshop.

[39]  Gerhard Weiss,et al.  Stigmergic coverage algorithm for multi-robot systems (demonstration) , 2012, AAMAS.