Print Email Facebook Twitter Robotic swarm control through artificial pheromone trails Title Robotic swarm control through artificial pheromone trails: The case of curious ants Author Durieux, Bram (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) Contributor Mazo, M. (mentor) Jarne Ornia, Daniel (graduation committee) Alonso Mora, Javier (graduation committee) Batselier, Kim (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Control Date 2019-06-17 Abstract The extraordinary capability of swarming ant species in route finding and foraging efficiency through trail trail development has been studied for many years. Scientists have been able to capture the behavior of individual ants in control algorithms and used the resulting artificial swarm of ants to solve difficult problems. These problems include function optimization, sorting, clustering and route finding. So far, the route finding capabilities, where agents solely rely on local available information, have only been demonstrated in virtual discrete domains. The aim of this thesis is the development of an agent based control method that allows a swarm of robots to establish a trail between a source and target, placed in an unknown domain. The method solely relies on information locally available to the agent. No direct communication among the agents is necessary as agents mark the environment to relay information. Simulations are performed in a Python and C-based computer program, developed in tandem with this study. A versatile controller is presented that, in conjunction with suggestions for the swarm size and pheromone characteristics, can be implemented on real robots to explore unknown environments in a multitude of scenarios. Subject swarm roboticsstigmergycontrol To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8ba2f5dc-daf8-4171-93ee-afb11a39a549 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2019 Bram Durieux Files PDF Thesis_BramDurieux2019_2.pdf 40.6 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:8ba2f5dc-daf8-4171-93ee-afb11a39a549/datastream/OBJ/view