Title: Improving Swarm Robotic Exploration with Limited Communication: Marker Exploration
Swarm robotics is the study of coordinating a large number of relatively simple robots. One key area of application is collective exploration/coverage, where the use of robots allows a more extensive search of hard to access or dangerous areas. For example, search-and-rescue in a disaster area. However, a key issue is the complexity of these robots. Increased complexity such as more complex communication between robots might allow for better coordination, but can come with high computational requirements and expensive robots which makes the swarms difficult to scale up. A potential solution is using beacons. Robots can drop beacons (such as RFID tags) in already explored areas. This is inspired by inspect behavior where insects mark areas with pheromones. While this is an already explored area of study, many marker methods require heterogeneous tasks and complex coordination between robots and markers. Instead, I propose a simple marker method where robots drop markers in explored areas and robots simply move away from those markers.