The diversified ecology in nature had various forms of swarm behaviors in
many species. The butterfly species is one of the prominent and a bit
insightful in their random flights and converting that into an artificial
metaphor would lead to enormous possibilities. This paper considers one such
metaphor known as Butterfly Mating Optimization (BMO). In BMO, the Bfly follows
the patrolling mating phenomena and simultaneously captures all the local
optima of multimodal functions. To imitate this algorithm, a mobile robot
(Bflybot) was designed to meet the features of the Bfly in the BMO algorithm.
Also, the multi-Bflybot swarm is designed to act like butterflies in nature and
follow the algorithm's rules. The real-time experiments were performed on the
BMO algorithm in the multi-robotic arena and considered the signal source as
the light source. The experimental results show that the BMO algorithm is
applicable to detect multiple signal sources with significant variations in
their movements i.e., static and dynamic. In the case of static signal sources,
with varying initial locations of Bflybots, the convergence is affected in
terms of time and smoothness. Whereas the experiments with varying step-size
leads to their variation in the execution time and speed of the bots. In this
work, experiments were performed in a dynamic environment where the movement of
the signal source in both maneuvering and non-maneuvering scenarios. The
Bflybot swarm is able to detect the single and multi-signal sources, moving
linearly in between two fixed points, in circular, up and down movements.To
evaluate the BMO phenomenon, various ongoing and prospective works such as
mid-sea ship detection, aerial search applications, and earthquake prediction
were discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figure