When robots contribute to eradicate the COVID-19 spread in a context of containment

In the era of autonomous robots, multi-targets search methods inspired researchers to develop adapted algorithms to robot constraints, and with the rising of Swarm Intelligence approaches, Swarm Robotics became a very popular topic. In this paper, the problem of searching for an exponentially increasing number of targets in a complex and unknown environment is addressed. Our main objective is to propose a Robotic target search strategy based on the Elephants Herding Optimization (EHO) algorithm, namely Robotic-EHO (REHO). The main additions were the collision-free path planning strategy, the velocity limitation, and the extension to the multi-target version in discrete environments. The proposed method has been the subject of many experiments, emulating the search of infected individuals by COVID-19 in a context of containment within complex and unknown random environments, as well as in the real case study of the USA. The particularity of these environments is their increasing targets’ number and the dynamic Containment Rate (CR) that we propose. The experimental results show that REHO reacts much better in high CR, early start search mission, and where the robots’ speed is higher than the virus spread speed.