Introducing Chemotaxis to a Mobile Robot

This paper deals with the path planning problem of a robot in a maze based on a parallel chemotaxis bio-inspired model. The goal is the effective search of a route, which can connect the starting position of an autonomous robot with a final requested dest

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School of Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi, Greece {chriseme,ndourvas,mtsompan,gsirak}@ee.duth.gr 2 University of the West of England, Bristol, UK [email protected] Abstract. This paper deals with the path planning problem of a robot in a maze based on a parallel chemotaxis bio-inspired model. The goal is the effective search of a route, which can connect the starting position of an autonomous robot with a final requested destination. To find this route the robot has to take under consideration its geometry, elements of its environment such as movements’ restrictions by obstacles and other characteristics of the topology. Chemotaxis is a term found in biology and refers to the movement of an organism in response to a chemical stimulus. Among numerous examples of such biological form here we get inspiration by Physarum polycephalum, since this slime mold has shown the ability to find the shortest path in a maze between two spots, where chemicals exist, by following the gradient of the chemo-attractants. Inspired by this behavior, chemotaxis will be used here to lead a robot to its desired destination inside a labyrinth. A device transmitting signals can be considered as an equivalent chemical source and the robot’s receiver will follow the increased gradient of signal’s amplitude. Moreover, an effective model, that has the ability to simulate such a problem reducing the calculations’ complexity and in the same time mimicking the specific behavior, namely Cellular Automata (CA) is coupled with chemotaxis. As a result, the design and implementation of a CA based bio-inspired algorithm is proposed and an E-Puck robot uses the exact algorithm to find the shortest path in different topologies as a proof of concept. Keywords: Artificial intelligence · Cellular Automata · Physarum polycephalum · Bio-inspired algorithm · Shortest path problem

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Introduction

One of the most well known and complex problems in the field robotics is to find the optimum path in a topology from one point to another. Many algorithms have been successfully proposed during the previous years to control the robots movement effectively and guide them to find the shortest path between two

c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016  Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved L. Iliadis and I. Maglogiannis (Eds.): AIAI 2016, IFIP AICT 475, pp. 396–404, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44944-9 34

Introducing Chemotaxis to a Mobile Robot

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specific spots in a topology [1–3]. In many cases the nature itself provides for centuries, solutions in similar problems. In this paper, the proposed algorithm is inspired by the chemotaxis operation, meaning the guidance of an organism to a specific place using chemical stimulus. Moreover we envisage modeling of chemotaxis through Physarum, a life form which has an extremely interesting behavior during its life cycle. It has been found that during its reproductive stage called plasmodium, takes a form that has the ability to find the min