Building a swarm of robotic bees

Swarm Robotics refers to the application of Swarm Intelligence techniques where a desired collective behavior emerges from the local interactions of robots with one another and with their environment. In this paper, a modified Bees Algorithm is proposed for multi-target search and coverage by an autonomous swarm of robotic “bees”. The objective is to find targets in an unknown area, send their estimated locations and fitness values to other robots in swarm which then provide the coverage of the found targets in a self-organized, decentralized way. The robots are equipped with ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance, thermal sensors for target detection, and ZigBee modules for local communication. For the experiments, a small swarm of robots was built to test the performance of the modified Bees Algorithm. The experimental results show that the swarm is self-organized, decentralized and adaptive, and it can be successfully applied to the unknown area search and coverage.