Multi-Robot Control Inspired by Bacterial Chemotaxis: Coverage and Rendezvous via Networking of Chemotaxis Controllers

This paper presents networked controllers for the coordination of multi-robot systems, inspired by the chemotaxis of bacteria. Chemotaxis is a biological phenomenon wherein each organism senses the concentration of a chemical in its environment and moves to the highest (or lowest) concentration point. The problem studied herein is a coverage problem, specifically, the problem of finding networked controllers to deploy robots so that they are located uniformly on a given space. To solve this problem, we decompose a global performance index quantifying the achieved degree of coverage into local indices that can be calculated in a distributed manner over the network of robots. By combining this with a controller causing chemotaxis, we present a solution to the coverage problem wherein each robot performs either a forward movement or random rotation based on the local performance index at each time step. Moreover, we extend this solution to rendezvous at an unspecified point. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves coverage and rendezvous only via the above two types of robot movements and can handle different tasks simply by changing the global performance index, through the appropriate use of the chemotaxis controller.