Edinburgh Napier University

  There are many constraints for a multi-robot system to perform a region coverage search task in an unknown environment. To address this, we propose a novel multi-robot distributed collaborative region coverage search algorithm based on Glasius bio-inspired neural network (GBNN). Firstly, we develop an environmental information updating model to represent the dynamic search environment. This model converts the environmental information detected by the robot into dynamic neural activity landscape of GBNN. Secondly, we introduce the distributed model predictive control method in search path planning to improve search efficiency. In addition, we propose a distributed collaborative decision-making mechanism among the robots to produce several dynamic search sub-teams. Within each sub-team, collaborative decisions are made among the robot members to optimize the solution and obtain the next movement path of each robot. Finally, we conduct experiments in three aspects to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with three algorithms in this field, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits good performance in a multi-robot region coverage search task.