Analysis of Exploration in Swarm Robotic Systems

Abstract

The exploration time for a swarm of robots doing object gathering depends on the specific task, environment, number of objects, and number of robots. Hence, it is important to understand how different properties affect the exploration time. To address this practical challenge, we present a theoretical analysis of the expected exploration time for a swarm of robots that are searching for objects in an arena and present experimental results obtained with different swarm sizes. The experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis.