Searching Targets Using Mobile Agents in a Large Scale Multi-robot Environment

This paper presents a framework for controlling multiple robots connected by communication networks. Instead of making multiple robots pursue several tasks simultaneously, the framework makes mobile software agents migrate from one robot to another to perform the tasks. Since mobile software agents can migrate to arbitrary robots by wireless communication networks, they can find the most suitably equipped and/or the most suitably located robots to perform their task. In the previous papers, we have shown that this manner of controlling multiple robots can decrease the number of required robot resources in the three-robot case. The three robots demonstrated that they could suppress the energy consumption through a mobile agent based approach. In this paper, we pursue a case of large scale multiple robots. We have implemented a simulator for a large number of robots based on our framework, and have demonstrated the efficiency and the scalability. We report the observations we found in the numerical experiments.