Social Insect-Inspired Multi-Robot Coverage (Extended Abstract)

Coordination is one of the most interesting and complicated research issues in distributed multi-robot systems (mrs), aiming to improve performance, energy consumption, robustness and reliability of a robotic system in accomplishing complex tasks such as coverage. Social insect-inspired coordination techniques achieve these goals by applying simple but effective heuristics from which elegant solutions emerge. Previous research investigated ant-inspired stigmergy (StiCo) and bee pheromone signalling (BeepCo) for multi-robot coverage [1, 2]. This paper tries to improve on previous approaches by introducing a hybrid ant-and-bee inspired approach, i.e., HybaCo. The proposed hybrid approach is evaluated in multiple scenarios using a high-level simulator and is compared to both StiCo and BeePCo. Experimental results from various scenarios identify strengths and weaknesses of the various algorithms and indicate that HybaCo effectively improves the area coverage uniformly.