Cooperative chemical concentration map building using Decentralized Asynchronous Particle Swarm Optimization based search by mobile robots

Abstract

In this article the main objective is to perform a search in an unknown area with multiple robots in order to determine the region with highest chemical gas concentration as well as to build the chemical gas concentration map. The searching and map building tasks are accomplished by using mobile robots equipped with smart transducers for gas sensing. Robots perform the search autonomously by using their own data and the information (position information and sensor readings) obtained from the other robots. Moreover, simultaneously the robots send their sensor readings of the chemical concentration and their position data to a remote computer (a base station), where the data is combined, interpolated, and filtered to form an real-time map of the chemical gas concentration in the environment. To achieve this task as a high-level path planning algorithm we use a decentralized and asynchronous version of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm which also allows for time-varying neighborhood.