A Cellular Automata Model with Repulsive Pheromone for Swarm Robotics in Surveillance

This study proposes an inverted ant cellular automata (IACA) model for swarm robots performing the surveillance task. A new distributed coordination strategy is described here, which was designed with a cellular automata-based modeling and using a repulsive pheromone-based search. The environmental structure is well-known to all robots and their current positions are shared by the team. Besides, they communicate indirectly through the repulsive pheromone, which is available to each robot as an information about its neighborhood. The pheromone is deposited at each time step by each robot, over its current position and neighborhood cells. The pheromone is also evaporated as the time goes by. All next movement decisions are stochastic giving a non-deterministic characteristic to the model. Simulation results are presented, by applying the proposed model to different environmental conditions.