Collective Robotic Site Preparation

Robotic site preparation has been identified as an integral precursor to human landings on Mars. Many species of social insect carry out the site preparation task when they construct their nests. A site preparation algorithm was developed based on the nest construction behavior of a particular species of ant, Leptothorax albipennis. In this paper, we present a new approach to modeling the temporal behavior of a multiple-robot system and apply it to our construction algorithm. In order to validate our model, experiments with multiple physical robots were conducted. Not only did the results of our experiments closely follow the predictions of our model, but the sites prepared by our robots appeared very similar to the nests built by the ants that were our inspiration.