A Distributed Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Swarm Robotic Applications

Abstract

We have derived a version of the particle swarm optimization algorithm that is suitable for a swarm consisting of a large number of small, mobile robots. The algorithm, called the distributed PSO (dPSO), is for "search" type operations and allows each robot to calculate its new position based on its present position and present measurement. It eliminates the needs for a central agent to coordinate the movements of the robots and has limited inter-robot communications requirements. Simulation results show that the dPSO is very good at finding a target location within a search space and is easily scaleable to large numbers of robots.