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Towards Building Terrain-Covering Ant Robots

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Ant Algorithms (ANTS 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2463))

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Abstract

We study robots that leave trails in the terrain to cover closed terrain efficiently and robustly. Such ant robots have so far been studied only theoretically for gross ant robot simpli.cations in unrealistic settings. In this article, we design ant robots for a realistic robot simulation environment. We discuss how large the markers should be that form the trail, how frequently they should be dropped, how large the sensed floor area below the ant robots should be, how the ant robots should move depending on where the markers are in the sensed area, and how the markers should be deleted to avoid saturating the floor with markers. We then report experiments that we have performed to understand the behavior of the resulting ant robots better, including their e.ciency and robustness in situations where they are failing, they are moved without realizing this, and markers are deleted. Finally, we report the results of a large-scale experiment where ten ant robots covered an area of 25 by 25 meters repeatedly over 85 hours.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 30312-0280, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Jonas Svennebring & Sven Koenig

Authors
  1. Jonas Svennebring
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  2. Sven Koenig
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDIA, Université de Bruxelles, CP 194/6 Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt 50, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo , Gianni Di Caro  & Michael Sampels ,  & 

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Svennebring, J., Koenig, S. (2002). Towards Building Terrain-Covering Ant Robots. In: Dorigo, M., Di Caro, G., Sampels, M. (eds) Ant Algorithms. ANTS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2463. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45724-0_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45724-0_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44146-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45724-4

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