A Modified Ant Colony Algorithm Used for Multi-robot Odor Source Localization

摘要

A multi-robot cooperation strategy based on a modified ant colony algorithm (ACA) is proposed. It enables the multi-robot system to search for the odor sources, which exist in the indoor environment, by imitating the forage behavior of the ant society. The modification of ACA includes new definitions of pheromone and heuristic function. And two extra search modes, local traversal search and global random search are added to improve the search performance of the robot system. A verification procedure is introduced into the iteration process to localize multiple odor sources. Simulation results have showed that the modified algorithm can effectively enable the robots to approach and determine the odor sources quickly and accurately.