Virtual-Source and Virtual-Swarm-Based Particle Swarm Optimizer for Large-Scale Multi-Source Location via Robot Swarm

Multi-source location is a significant application in the field of robot swarm and is required to find all sources whose number and distribution are unknown in advance. With few parameters and fast search, Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO) variants that have certain grouping capability have been applied to address multi-source location problems by dividing a swarm such that every source has robots to locate. However, they are difficult to predetermine the exact number of groups, require a big number of robots, and are easily trapped in the no-signal areas when the proportion of no-signal areas is high. This work proposes a Virtual-source and Virtual-swarm-based PSO (VVPSO) to divide a search area into multiple cells equally, each of which has a virtual source in its center. Then, instead of robots grouping, only one group of robots is employed to traverse all virtual sources, and search their corresponding cells to locate real sources by a new PSO called Real-virtual mapping PSO (RMPSO). RMPSO asymmetrically maps a robot into a particle swarm with multiple virtual particles to perform PSO, which greatly reduces the requirements for the number of robots. Experimental results show that VVPSO has great search scalability and can solve large-scale multi-source location problems than two state-of-the-art grouping methods and three representative multimodal PSO variants, even with only one robot. Hence, this work greatly advances the field of multi-source location by using mobile robot swarm.