Swarm Robotic Source Seeking with Fractional Fluxotaxis

This work looks at introducing fractional calculus into the source seeking problem by modifying the fluxotaxis strategy with the Caputo fractional order derivative to achieve better performance given several types of wind conditions (e.g. meandering) driven by a colored noise process. The fractional order fluxotaxis (FO-fluxotaxis) method is compared against the integer order fluxotaxis method, anemotaxis, chemotaxis, and casting using the plume order simulation (POSIM) framework. The arrival time, distance travelled, and closeness of each method are used to analyze the performance efficiency of the swarm strategies. For certain FO-fluxotaxis orders, better performance can be observed.