A PSO-based approach to cooperative foraging multi-robots in 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 (IPPSO) approach is proposed for cooperative robots to accomplish the foraging tasks in unknown environments. The proposed cooperation strategy for a multi-robot system makes use of the potential field function as the fitness function of PSO. In the simulation studies, various scenarios are investigated. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by simulation studies.