A lobster-inspired multi-robot control strategy for monitoring non-stationary concentration fields

Abstract

We propose a new lobster-inspired chemotaxis decentralized control strategy for monitoring a non-stationary concentration field using a team of nonholonomic mobile robots. The task of the team is to locate and trace the movement of the point (or points) with the highest field value (i.e. source), provided that the robots are not aware of the dynamics of the field and can only periodically sample the field at their locations. As an example of the concentration field we consider a population of biological species modeled by a self-organizing multi-agent system with agents acting as individuals of the population in accordance with some flocking rules. The proposed strategy combines the lobsters’ plume localization behavior and flocking mechanisms to efficiently solve the problem even with a small group of robots. Simulations and experimental works on physical unicycle robots are performed to validate the efectiveness of the approach for the cases of non-stationary fields.