A Multi-agent UAV Swarm for Automatic Target Recognition

Distributed Task Selection in Multi-agent Based Swarms Using Heuristic Strategies

“…We have implemented our swarming algorithms for a distributed automatic target recognition(ATR) application using unmanned aerial robots [5]. The scenario consists of targets distributed randomly in an environment.…”

“…Gossip messages are forwarded by robots using the probabilistic flooding algorithm described in [5] to disseminate information about a recently discovered target across the swarm. The format of the gossip message is given by: < id, x, z, ttl, v, f ound id , t x , t z , t pher >, where id id of robot sending the message x, z 2-d coordinates of the robot sending the message ttl Number of hops (time-to-live)from its source after which the gossip message ceases to be forwarded by robots v Number of visits by robots to the target contained in the message f ound id Id of the robot that discovered the target in the message t x , t z 2-d coordinates of the target contained in the message t pher…”

“…Obstacle and Collision Avoidance: To prevent collision between robots, each robot uses a potential field based object avoidance technique described in [5]. Collision avoidance takes precedence over all other actions.…”

“…In the recent past, several computational systems using swarming have been developed for different applications including vehicle routing [16], self-repairing formation control for mobile agents [23], adaptive control in overlay networks [3], and for military applications [5,19,21]. Most of these approaches do not address the task selection problem in swarming as a independent issue and use straightforward approaches such as greedy algorithms within a centralized shared memory setting [9,19] that facilitates rapid information exchange between the swarm units.…”

“…Algorithms for deployment, search and discovery, communication and task execution for swarming are implemented in our system using the algorithms described in [5]. Functionally, each computational unit in our swarmed system is a mobile robot that contains a processor executing the algorithms implemented by an agent.…”