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Cooperative Pollution Source Exploration and Cleanup with a Bio-inspired Swarm Robot Aggregation

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Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2020)

Abstract

Using robots for exploration of extreme and hazardous environments has the potential to significantly improve human safety. For example, robotic solutions can be deployed to find the source of a chemical leakage and clean the contaminated area. This paper demonstrates a proof-of-concept bio-inspired exploration method using a swarm robotic system based on a combination of two bio-inspired behaviors: aggregation, and pheromone tracking. The main idea of the work presented is to follow pheromone trails to find the source of a chemical leakage and then carry out a decontamination task by aggregating at the critical zone. Using experiments conducted by a simulated model of a Mona robot, the effects of population size and robot speed on the ability of the swarm was evaluated in a decontamination task. The results indicate the feasibility of deploying robotic swarms in an exploration and cleaning task in an extreme environment.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by OP VVV project Research Center for Informatics, code CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000765, and the UK EPSRC projects RAIN (EP/R026084/1) and RNE (EP/P01366X/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mechanical Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Arash Sadeghi Amjadi, Mohsen Raoufi & Ali Emre Turgut

  2. Artificial Intelligence Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czechia

    George Broughton & Tomáš Krajník

  3. Swarm and Computational Intelligence Lab (SwaCIL), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Farshad Arvin

Authors
  1. Arash Sadeghi Amjadi
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  2. Mohsen Raoufi
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  3. Ali Emre Turgut
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  4. George Broughton
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  5. Tomáš Krajník
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  6. Farshad Arvin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arash Sadeghi Amjadi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Honghao Gao

  2. Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China

    Xinheng Wang

  3. London South Bank University, London, UK

    Muddesar Iqbal

  4. Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China

    Yuyu Yin

  5. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jianwei Yin

  6. Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Ning Gu

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© 2021 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Sadeghi Amjadi, A., Raoufi, M., Turgut, A.E., Broughton, G., Krajník, T., Arvin, F. (2021). Cooperative Pollution Source Exploration and Cleanup with a Bio-inspired Swarm Robot Aggregation. In: Gao, H., Wang, X., Iqbal, M., Yin, Y., Yin, J., Gu, N. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 350. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67540-0_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67540-0_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67539-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67540-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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