Search Strategies and Specifications in a Swarm versus Swarm Context

Farid, Ali Moltajaei; Kamal, Abdus Samad; Egerton, Simon

doi:10.1017/s0263574721000059

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

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“…Swarm robotic systems (SRSs) represent teams of large number of robots that collaborate to accomplish complex tasks [1][2][3][4] such as environmental monitoring [5], collective perception [6], and exploration [7]. Collaboration is, typically, achieved through exchange of information amongst the member robots as well as between the robots and possible external infrastructure via wireless communication devices and/or onboard sensors [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Restoring Connectivity in Robotic Swarms – A Probabilistic Approach

Eshaghi,

Sari,

Haigh

et al. 2024

J Intell Robot Syst

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Connectivity is an integral trait for swarm robotic systems to enable effective collaboration between the robots in the swarm. However, connectivity can be lost due to events that could not have been a priori accounted for. This paper presents a novel probabilistic connectivity-restoration strategy for swarms with limited communication capabilities. Namely, it is assumed that the swarm comprises a group of follower robots whose global connectivity to a base can only be achieved via a localized leader robot. In this context, the proposed strategy incrementally restores swarm connectivity by searching for the lost robots in regions-of-interest (RoIs) determined using probability theory. Once detected, newly found robots are either recruited to help the leader in the restoration process, or directly guided to their respective destinations through accurate localization and corrective motion commands. The proposed swarm-connectivity strategy, thus, comprises the following three stages: (i) identifying a discrete set of optimal RoIs, (ii) visitation of these RoIs, by the leader robot, via an optimal inter-region search path, and (iii) searching for lost robots within the individual RoIs via an optimal intra-region search path. The strategy is novel in its use of a probabilistic approach to guide the leader robot’s search as well as the potential recruitment of detected lost robots to help in the restoration process. The effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic swarm connectivity-restoration strategy is represented, herein, through a detailed simulated experiment. The significant efficiency of the strategy is also illustrated numerically via a comparison to a competing random-walk based method.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Restoring Connectivity in Robotic Swarms – A Probabilistic Approach

Eshaghi,

Sari,

Haigh

et al. 2024

J Intell Robot Syst

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Effective UAV patrolling for swarm of intruders with heterogeneous behavior

et al. 2023

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The phenomenal growth in the utilization of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones leads to an urgent need for new approaches to ensure safety in the sky. Effective aerial surveillance requires patrolling swarms to react according to the various behaviors demonstrated by intruding swarms, but existing approaches are not practical when dealing with a large number of drones. Specifically, predicting the behaviors or planned paths of the intruding swarms is highly challenging as intruders may perform evasive strategies to avoid detection. Therefore, this work utilizes heuristic search strategies and investigates how various intruder behaviors affect the search performance. To investigate the search performance, a swarm versus swarm simulator is developed. Using the simulator, first, a comparative study is performed to evaluate how intruders’ behaviors can affect the performance of the patrolling swarm. Subsequently, three approaches, including single-objective optimization, multi-objective optimization, and Lévy flight, are compared in terms of their detection performance in a bounded space. The results suggest that multi-objective optimization outperforms both single-objective optimization and Lévy flight-based approaches. Furthermore, our results show that intruders have a lower chance of being tracked when moving in a dense crowd, and this finding reaffirms the schooling behaviors of fish. In a specific simulation scenario, the total percentage of detection is above 90%. However, the detection percentage is highly related to other factors such as search space, number of patrolling UAVs, and the intruders’ behaviors.

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Distributed Broadcast Control of Multi-Agent Systems Using Hierarchical Coordination

Hasan,

Saifullah,

Kamal

et al. 2024

Biomimetics

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Broadcast control (BC) is a bio-inspired coordination technique for a swarm of agents in which a single coordinator broadcasts an identical scalar signal to all performing agents without discrimination, and the agents make appropriate moves towards the agents’ collective optimal state without communicating with one another. The BC technique aims to accomplish a globally assigned task for which BC utilizes a stochastic optimization algorithm to coordinate a group of agents. However, the challenge intensifies as the system becomes larger: it requires a larger number of agents, which protracts the converging time for a single coordinator-based BC model. This paper proposes a revamped version of BC model, which assimilates distributed multiple coordinators to control a larger multi-agent system efficiently in a pragmatic manner. Precisely, in this hierarchical BC scheme, the distributed multiple sub-coordinators broadcast the identical feedback signal to the agents, which they receive from the global coordinator to accomplish the coverage control task of the ordinary agents. The dual role of sub-coordinators is manipulated by introducing weighted averaging of the gradient estimation under the stochastic optimization mechanism. The potency of the proposed model is analyzed with numerical simulation for a coverage control task, and various performance aspects are compared with the typical BC schemes to demonstrate its practicability and performance improvement. Particularly, the proposed scheme shows the same convergence with about 30% less traveling costs, and the near convergence is reached by only about one-third of iteration steps compared to the typical BC.

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Search Strategies and Specifications in a Swarm versus Swarm Context

Cited by 3 publications

References 37 publications

Restoring Connectivity in Robotic Swarms – A Probabilistic Approach

Restoring Connectivity in Robotic Swarms – A Probabilistic Approach

Effective UAV patrolling for swarm of intruders with heterogeneous behavior

Distributed Broadcast Control of Multi-Agent Systems Using Hierarchical Coordination

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