Introducing the Fractional Order Robotic Darwinian PSO

The Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) is an evolutionary algorithm that extends the Particle Swarm Optimization using natural selection to enhance the ability to escape from sub-optimal solutions. An extension of the DPSO to multi-robot applications has been recently proposed and denoted as Robotic Darwinian PSO (RDPSO), benefiting from the dynamical partitioning of the whole population of robots, hence decreasing the amount of required information exchange among robots. This paper further extends the previously proposed algorithm using fractional calculus concepts to control the convergence rate, while considering the robot dynamical characteristics. Moreover, to improve the convergence analysis of the RDPSO, an adjustment of the fractional coefficient based on mobile robot constraints is presented and experimentally assessed with 2 real platforms. Afterwards, this novel fractional-order RDPSO is evaluated in 12 physical robots being further explored using a larger population of 100 simulated mobile robots within a larger scenario. Experimental results show that changing the fractional coefficient does not significantly improve the final solution but presents a significant influence in the convergence time because of its inherent memory property.