One of the most effective forms of communication observed in nature is pheromone based, used by social insects to carry out tasks such as finding food or identifying one another. In large scale search and rescue, making use of multiple robotic swarms to complete tasks will allow for the search to be carried out more quickly. The ability for swarms to recognize other members, as well as opposing swarm intruders, has the potential to prevent overlapping search areas, thus reducing time needed to complete tasks. There has been previous research into the area of swarm robotics within a search and rescue setting, but there are few that make use of multiple pheromone technology. Multiple pheromone technology expands what is possible with the swarms and allows for the interaction between two swarms to be exploited in a large-scale setting to improve the overall efficiency. In this project the use of
identification pheromones will be evaluated for its effectiveness, to enhance the speed of search and rescue efforts in conjunction with aggregation pheromones to carry out searching tasks.
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