Swarm Approach to Chemical Source Localization

Abstract

We present a physics-based approach to the localization of chemical sources with autonomous swarms. Robotic vehicles with short-range sensors use local pair-wise interactions to self-assemble into structured lattice formations, serving as distributed sensor and computational meshes. The robots use fluid flow information to navigate toward the chemical emitter. We develop a new search algorithm from first principles of fluid mechanics that outperforms the leading biomimetic competitors for the chemical source localization task. A validation of the scalability of our solution via simulation of plume and vehicle dynamics is given