Exploring unknown environments with multi-modal locomotion swarm

Swarm robotics is focused on creating intelligent systems from large number of simple robots. The majority of nowadays robots are bound to operations within mono-modal locomotion (i.e. land, air or water). However, some animals have the capacity to alter their locomotion modalities to suit various terrains, operating at high levels of competence in a range of substrates. One of the most significant challenges in bio-inspired robotics is to determine how to use multimodal locomotion to help robots perform a variety of tasks. In this paper, we investigate the use of multi-modal locomotion on a swarm of robots through a multi-target search algorithm inspired from the behavior of flying ants. Features of swarm intelligence such as distributivity, robustness and scalability are ensured by the proposed algorithm. Although the simplicity of movement policies of each agent, complex and efficient exploration is achieved at the team level.