A niching PSO-based multi-robot cooperation method for localizing odor sources

Aiming at the problem of multiple odor sources localization, a multi-robot cooperation method based on niching particle swarm optimization is presented in this study. In this method, a robot is regarded as a particle, particles located at a neighbor form a niche, and different niches are employed to localize different odor sources synchronously. In order to localize more odor sources, the size of each niche is dynamically adjusted based on the aggregation degree of its elements. A niche merging strategy, based on the similarity of optimal particles found by niches, is proposed to prevent particles repeatedly searching for the same region. In addition, some real conditions such as the sampling/recovery time of a sensor and the velocity limit of a robot are considered when updating the position of a particle. Finally, the proposed method is applied to various scenarios of localizing multiple odor sources, and the experimental results confirm its effectiveness.