Biologically-inspired behaviour based robotics for making invisible pollution visible: a survey

Behaviour-based robotics is a paradigm that was proposed by Rodney Brooks in 1986. This paradigm proposes that robotic solutions should be developed by combining various reactive behaviours in an architecture. This survey overviews various biologically inspired source-seeking and multi-agent algorithms that could be combined in a behavior-based architecture towards providing visual concentration or profile information of invisible hazardous pollutants in dangerous environments. The need for this becomes even more necessary when hazardous substances that cannot be observed by human eyes are present in the environment. An example of such a scenario was the nuclear disaster caused by a Tsunami in Japan in 2011. Causalities from this disaster event could have been greatly reduced if the concentration profile of the resulting invisible pollution and radiation was made visible by using a swarm of flying microrobots. © 2014 Taylor & Francis and The Robotics Society of Japan.