A PSO-based approach to cooperative foraging tasks of multi-robots in completely unknown environments

Cooperative foraging tasks in unknown environments are fundamentally important in robotics, where the real-time path planning and proper task allocation strategies are desirable for multi-robot cooperation. In this paper, an improved potential field-based PSO (IPPSO) approach is applied to accomplish the cooperative foraging tasks in completely unknown environments, compared to the cases using the PPSO approach. The proposed cooperation strategy for a multi-robot system makes use of the potential field function as the fitness function of PSO, while the added dynamic parameter tuning and district-difference degree can increase the work efficiency, and help the multi-robot system to complete the tasks in complex environments. In the simulation studies, various scenarios are investigated. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by the experiment results.