A Model for Bio-Inspired Underwater Swarm Robotic Exploration

Swarm intelligence has interested researchers in various areas of research for several decades because of its stability, resilience and simplicity. Several researchers have used swarm intelligence behaviours to design systems which can accomplish single tasks. In this paper, we will make a step forward by designing a swarm intelligent system that draws from two different natural swarms, bees and slime mould, to form an integrated underwater swarm robotic exploration system. An agent based simulation of such a system is presented in this paper along with some basic performance evaluation measures of the presented system. The main question the authors are attempting to answer through this model is how feasible the such an exploration system would be with regards to time, the number of robots allocated by the decentralized system for exploring interesting locations and the resilience of such a system to failures in robots. The first simulation results obtained from this model shows how decentralized control inspired by swarm intelligence can be used to design systems for real world applications. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.