Title: A bioinspired multi-agent system based on monocular vision

Authors: Evandro Luís Souza Falleiros; Renato Profirio Ishii; Rodrigo Calvo

Addresses: Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso do Sul, Dourados, Brazil ' Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande, Brazil ' Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Paraná, Maringá, Brazil

Abstract: Develop multi-robot real-time applications is a complex task. In order to deal with such scenarios, this paper proposes PheroSLAM, a bio-inspired multi-robot system based on monocular camera, which adopt an extended version of ant colony optimisation approach to coordinate multiple-robot teams. Moreover, robots launch repulsive artificial pheromone around themself, creating a repulsive trail in PheroSLAM system. A vision-based mechanism is also used to provide visual odometry and to build a 3D feature-based map, considering that every robot must be able to localise itself in the explored environment. Therefore, the relevance of the proposal is to extend an SLAM problem for many robots and promote the robots move autonomously in the environment according a bio-inspired coordination strategy. Experimental evidences indicated the dispersibility of the PheroSLAM system, increasing the covered area of an environment. Also, results showed that the coordination strategy is efficient and satisfactory to accomplish the exploration task.

Keywords: multi-robot systems; multi-robot framework; ROS applications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2017.084890

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2017 Vol.8 No.2, pp.122 - 132

Received: 23 Dec 2015
Accepted: 03 Mar 2016

Published online: 08 Jul 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article