Increasing the Efficiency of Robot Swarm Navigation with the Help of Virtual Pheromone Direction Labels

This article deals with the problem of improving the navigation efficiency of a swarm of robots controlled by an adapted ant algorithm. It is shown that in the presence of an extensive network of virtual pheromone tracks, the efficiency of a swarm of robots can be reduced due to the formation of closed loops by pheromone tracks, through which robots can wander during their movement to the desired resource source. It is also shown that the problem of increasing the efficiency of navigation of a swarm of robots can be solved with the help of virtual pheromone direction labels. In the course of computer simulation, the performance of the proposed oriented ant algorithm and its ability to increase the efficiency of navigation of a swarm of robots were confirmed.