Abstract
Coordination is one of the most challenging 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. Social insect-inspired coordination techniques achieve these goals by applying simple but effective heuristics from which elegant solutions emerge. In our previous research, we demonstrated the effectiveness of a hybrid ant-and-bee inspired approach, HybaCo, designed to provide coordinated multi-robot solutions to area coverage problems in simple environments. In this paper, we extend this work and illustrate the effectiveness of our hybrid ant-and-bee inspired approach (HybaCo) in complex environments with static obstacles. We evaluate both the ant-inspired (StiCo) and bee-inspired (BeePCo) approaches separately, and then compare them according to a number of performance criteria using a high-level simulator. Experimental results indicate that HybaCo improves the area coverage uniformly in complex environments as well as simple environments.
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Broecker, B., Caliskanelli, I., Tuyls, K., Sklar, E.I., Hennes, D. (2015). Hybrid Insect-Inspired Multi-Robot Coverage in Complex Environments. In: Dixon, C., Tuyls, K. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9287. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22416-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22416-9_8
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