Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to become one of the main driving factors for innovation in the field of robotics. The research presented in this paper explores the feasibility of a swarm robotics system in an urban environment. By using bio-inspired foraging methods such as multi-place foraging and stigmergy-based navigation, a swarm of robots is able to improve the efficiency and autonomy of the urban waste management system in a realistic scenario. To achieve this, a diverse set of simulation experiments was conducted using real-world GIS data and implementing different garbage collection scenarios driven by robot swarms. Results presented in this research show that the proposed system outperforms current approaches. Moreover, results not only show the efficiency of our solution, but also give insights about how to design and customize these systems.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication in IEEE ICRA 201

Magnetic Trails: A Novel Artificial Pheromone for Swarm Robotics in Outdoor Environments

[EN] Swarm robotics finds inspiration in nature to model behaviors, such as the use of pheromone principles. Pheromones provide an indirect and decentralized communication scheme that have shown positive experimental results. Real implementations of pheromones have suffered from slow sensors and have been limited to controlled environments. This paper presents a novel technology to implement real pheromones for swarm robotics in outdoor environments by using magnetized ferrofluids. A ferrofluid solution, with its deposition and magnetization system, is detailed. The proposed substance does not possess harmful materials for the environment and can be safely handled by humans. Validation demonstrates that the substance represents successfully pheromone characteristics of locality, diffusion and evaporation on several surfaces in outdoor conditions. Additionally, the experiments show an improvement over the chemical representation of pheromones by using magnetic substances and existing magnetometer sensor technologies, which provide better response rates and recovery periods than MOX chemical sensors. The present work represents a step toward swarm robotics experimentation in uncontrolled outdoor environments. In addition, the presented pheromone technology may be use by the broad area of swarm robotics for robot exploration and navigation.We would like to warmly thank Cindy Calderon-Arce. This paper was achieved thanks to her support and advice. Special thanks also to Research and Outreach Vice-Rectory at Costa Rica Institute of Technology (VIE, ITCR), for their support of PROE project (code VIE 1440036).Brenes-Torres, JC.; Blanes Noguera, F.; Simó Ten, JE. (2022). Magnetic Trails: A Novel Artificial Pheromone for Swarm Robotics in Outdoor Environments. Computation. 10(6):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/computation1006009811610