ATRC: A swarm-based robot team coordination protocol for mine detection and unknown space discovery

In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of robots to detect and disarm mines. The goal is to minimize the overall exploration time and to disarm all mines in a landscape. We present two approaches for the coordination of robots. An indirect communication, stigmergy, inspired to biology is used to help robots to cover the overall area in a minimum time. In this way the robot simultaneously explore different regions of their environment. Moreover, a new coordination protocol called Ant-based Task and Robot Coordination (ATRC) is proposed to recruit robots and disarm mines in a minimum amount of time. This approach has been implemented and tested extensively in a simulation environment. The results showed the best convergence time of proposal in term of space discovery in comparison with a well-known algorithm such as the Vertex Ant Walk (VAW). Moreover the effectiveness of proposed protocol is evaluated varying network parameters in the simulation.