Unintelligent Swarming for Robust Exploratory Systems

Using many inexpensive rovers in place of single costly ones is an idea that has been gaining attention in the last decade. While much research in the field addresses intelligent swarming, in this paper, we look at unintelligent swarming as a control mechanism for an exploratory system. The two main issues that determine its effectiveness are how thoroughly a space is covered, and whether or not the swarm is able to maintain its behavior in the face of failures in the system. These results show that a simple algorithm implemented here produces performance that is highly robust and well suited to exploration.