Contributed talk in Swarm Behaviour 2, Aug. 2, 2019, noon in room NUBS 2.03

Extended Artificial Pheromone System for Swarm Robotic Applications

Seongin Na, Mohsen Raoufi, Ali Emre Turgut, Tomas Krajnik, Farshad Arvin

watch Publication This paper proposes an artificial pheromone communication system inspired by social insects. The proposed model is an extension of the previously developed pheromone communication system, COS-$\Phi$. The new model increases COS-$\Phi$ flexibility by adding two new features, namely, diffusion and advection. The proposed system consists of an LCD flat screen that is placed horizontally, overhead digital camera to track mobile robots, and a computer to process the images received from the camera and to inject pheromone trails on the LCD. To investigate the feasibility of the proposed pheromone system, real micro-robots, Colias, were deployed which mimicked insects' role in tracking the pheromone trails. The results showed that the proposed extensions affected swarm behaviour, significantly. Moreover, the proposed model provided a more realistic pheromone model.