Increasing the Efficiency of Robot Swarm Navigation with the Help of Virtual Pheromone Direction Labels

This article deals with the problem of improving the navigation efficiency of a swarm of robots controlled by an adapted ant algorithm. It is shown that in the presence of an extensive network of virtual pheromone tracks, the efficiency of a swarm of robots can be reduced due to the formation of closed loops by pheromone tracks, through which robots can wander during their movement to the desired resource source. It is also shown that the problem of increasing the efficiency of navigation of a swarm of robots can be solved with the help of virtual pheromone direction labels. In the course of computer simulation, the performance of the proposed oriented ant algorithm and its ability to increase the efficiency of navigation of a swarm of robots were confirmed.

I. Introduction

The rapid progress of swarm robotics, which has been observed in recent times, is primarily due to the improvement of algorithms for controlling the work of a swarm of robots. Today, various algorithms are used to control a swarm of robots. A special place among these algorithms is occupied by the ant algorithm, which allows a swarm of robots to efficiently perform such tasks as finding an effective route to the identified resource source and surveying the given territory.