Event
SPACE Uses Pheromone Fields to Reduce Collision Rates in Swarm Exploration
1 reports · 1 sources
Researchers including Haohua Que proposed the SPACE swarm exploration method, which maintains frontier-attracting pheromones, exploration-repelling pheromones, and a robot density field on a synchronously shared map to provide local guidance for tens to hundreds of ground robots. The authors claim that, compared with a greedy nearest-frontier planner, SPACE reduces robot-to-robot contact rates by 4 to 17 times while keeping coverage time within about 2%. The evaluation used 16 home layouts from HouseExpo and 8 campus floors from KTH, with up to 256 robots. At crowded scales, SPACE achieved the lowest contact rate on HouseExpo and was located on the empirical Pareto frontier on KTH. The paper has been accepted by IEEE ROBIO 2026.
Report timeline
- SPACE: Adaptive Collision-Aware Swarm Exploration Based on Pheromone Fields
SPACE is a swarm exploration method inspired by ant foraging. On a synchronized shared map, it maintains an attractive frontier pheromone, a repellent exploration pheromone, and a fast robot-density field, providing local field guidance for robots. The authors evaluated it on sixteen home layouts from HouseExpo and eight campus floors from KTH, using up to two hundred fifty-six robots. At congested swarm sizes, SPACE achieved the lowest inter-robot contact rate on HouseExpo and lay on the empirical Pareto frontier on KTH.
arXiv cs.RO ·