Towards Building Terrain-Covering Ant Robots
We study robots that leave trails in the terrain to cover closed terrain efficiently and robustly. Such ant robots have so far been studied only theoretically for gross ant robot simplifications in unrealistic settings. In this article, we design ant robots for a realistic robot simulation environment. We discuss how large the markers should be that form the trail, how frequently they should be dropped, how large the sensed floor area below the ant robots should be, how the ant robots should move depending on where the markers are in the sensed area, and how the markers should be deleted to avoid saturating the floor with markers. We then report experiments that we have performed to understand the behavior of the resulting ant robots better, including their efficiency and robustness in situations where they are failing, they are moved without realizing this, and markers are deleted. Finally, we report the results of a large-scale experiment where ten ant robots covered an area of 25 by 25 meters repeatedly over 85 hours.