A Virtual Physics-Based Approach to Chemical Source Localization Using Mobile Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-robot cooperation strategy with virtual-physics force which includes three kinds of effort: structure formation force, goal force, and obstacle avoidant force. For swarm formation, a virtual robot is located at the center of the polygon. The innovative contribution of the strategy is that robots only having two kinds of forces: structure formation force and obstacle avoidant force while virtual robot having one kind of force: goal force. The motion of the virtual robot depends on the goal force which obtained from the sensor observations of the robots. Once the virtual robot moved to a new place, robots would also move with the forces acted on themselves as a single body and maintain a regular polygon formation. Simulation experiments are carried out, and the results show that the proposed strategy can effectively navigate the mobile robotics swarms to the chemical source in an indoor arena.