Abstract:

Ant robots are simple creatures with limited sensing and computational capabilities as well as very noisy actuation. They have the advantage that they are easy to program and cheap to build. This makes it feasible to deploy groups of ant robots and take advantage of the resulting fault tolerance and parallelism. We study their behavior for one-time or repeated coverage of terrain, as required for surveillance, guarding terrain, mine sweeping, and surface inspection. Our navigation methods do not require the ant robots to be localized, which completely eliminates solving difficult and time-consuming localization problems. They can be used by single ant robots and groups of ant robots and are robust even if the ant robots are moved without realizing this (say, by people running into them), some ant robots fail, and some markings get destroyed. This is joint work with J. Svennebring and Y. Liu.