Bflier's: A Novel Butterfly Inspired Multi-robotic Model in Search of Signal Sources

The diversified ecology in nature had various forms of swarm behaviors in many species. The butterfly species is one of the prominent and a bit insightful in their random flights and converting that into an artificial metaphor would lead to enormous possibilities. This paper considers one such metaphor known as Butterfly Mating Optimization (BMO). In BMO, the Bfly follows the patrolling mating phenomena and simultaneously captures all the local optima of multimodal functions. To imitate this algorithm, a mobile robot (Bflybot) was designed to meet the features of the Bfly in the BMO algorithm. Also, the multi-Bflybot swarm is designed to act like butterflies in nature and follow the algorithm's rules. The real-time experiments were performed on the BMO algorithm in the multi-robotic arena and considered the signal source as the light source. The experimental results show that the BMO algorithm is applicable to detect multiple signal sources with significant variations in their movements i.e., static and dynamic. In the case of static signal sources, with varying initial locations of Bflybots, the convergence is affected in terms of time and smoothness. Whereas the experiments with varying step-size leads to their variation in the execution time and speed of the bots. In this work, experiments were performed in a dynamic environment where the movement of the signal source in both maneuvering and non-maneuvering scenarios. The Bflybot swarm is able to detect the single and multi-signal sources, moving linearly in between two fixed points, in circular, up and down movements.To evaluate the BMO phenomenon, various ongoing and prospective works such as mid-sea ship detection, aerial search applications, and earthquake prediction were discussed.