An investigation on ethanol based artificial pheromone trail formation and detection for multi robot coordinated motion

Swarming ant species have extraordinary capability of route finding and foraging through trail development. After studying for many years, scientists have been able to capture behaviour of individual ants to develop control algorithms and using it in swarm of ants to solve difficult problems. Some of the problems are sorting, route finding and clustering. Till now, the route-finding capability of agents have only been demonstrated in simulations. The aim of the research is to develop an artificial pheromone-based swarm platform to mimic ant behaviour in multi robot system. The method is to create a trail between target and source, agent uses that trail as only local information available for communication. Leader-follower multi robot system will be designed to use artificial pheromone as communication between robots to perform certain tasks in unknown environment.