Pheromone Inspired with Directional Variable on Underwater Robot Swarm

This paper presents a method to organize a swarm of underwater robots to search for targets. Considering the communication constraints in underwater environment, robots in the swarm are organized through in-direct communication, inspired by the phenomenon that social insects exchange information with pheromone. In the method, the area of interest is modeled as a matrix by scattering the area into a set of grids. The elements of the matrix represent the pheromone density of each grid. A set of behavior laws are then defined so that each robot can make decision based on the pheromone matrix. By adding a directional variable into the behavior laws can improve efficiency. The effectiveness of the method has been verified with simulation results.