Hybrid Insect-Inspired Multi-Robot Coverage in Complex Environments

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.