Application and Experimental Validation of Pheromone Design in Ant Colony Optimization: the Problem of Robot Skin Wiring

Abstract

During the past few years, the problem of optimally routing the wiring in large-scale modular skins for robots gained much attention in the literature. From a theoretical standpoint, the problem is NP-hard. Following previous work (Anghinolfi et al. 2012; Nattero et al. 2012), we solve the skin wiring problem using an ant colony optimization approach. In this article, we specifically address the problem of designing a pheromone structure that is effective in terms of solution quality. In particular, we propose five different alternatives, which are thoroughly validated using problem instances originating from both real and theoretical (i.e., artificially generated) use cases.