Coordination techniques of mobile robots with energy constraints

Mobile robots are used in many applications, such as planetary exploration, search and rescue, surveillance. Cooperative behaviour in decentralized mobile agents requires communication among them. However, such communication can have negative consequences for the energy consumption. In this paper, we applied two bio-inspired meta-heuristics for the coordination of mobile robots that need to accomplish some tasks in an unknown area under a energy constraint. We address the issue on how the swarm communicates which the others to resolve some targets disseminated in the area cooperatively in a situation when there is a sudden stop of one or more robots for the battery consumption. The proposed strategies implement different communication approaches. The first employs the sensing communication between the swarm using a pheromone like a recruiting mechanism and the other strategy employs a wireless communication among the swarm. A simulator, that implements the strategies, was developed and the experimental set ups evaluate the quality of the two meta-heuristics considering how good solution is in terms of energy consumption taking into account the number of resolved targets and percentage of explored cells. We compares these two methods with the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Results indicates that the firefly-based strategy usually gives superior performance.