Swarm robotic odor localization: Off-line optimization and validation with real robots

This paper presents an investigation of odor localization by groups of autonomous mobile robots using principles of Swarm Intelligence. First, we describe a distributed algorithm by which groups of agents can solve the full odor localization task more efficiently than a single agent. Next, we demonstrate that a group of real robots under fully distributed control can successfully traverse a real odor plume, and that an embodied simulator can faithfully reproduce these real robots experiments. Finally, we use the embodied simulator combined with a reinforcement learning, algorithm to optimize performance across group size, showing that it can be useful not only for improving real world odor localization, but also for quantitatively characterizing the influence of group size on task performance.