Swarm Robot Exploration Strategy for Path Formation Tasks Inspired by Physarum polycephalum

Figure 5

The networks constructed by Physarum polycephalum and swarm robots. (a) Created by Physarum polycephalum. A: a location where tubes intersect, called a node; B: one of the tubes that make up the network. (b) Created by swarm robots: the dotted and solid lines represent connections to the valid communication neighbours of a Robot_Explorer and a Robot_Node, respectively; the numbers represent the gradient value of each Robot_Node; and the arrows point in the direction of each robot’s current movement.

(a)

(b)