HORMCOMM: Hormone-Inspired Cooperative Communication
Abstract
The control and communication of massive robot swarms in a distributed manner is a difficult problem because global behaviors must be emerged as a collection of many local actions. This project uses a biologically inspired control method called Digital Hormone Model (DHM) to control the communication, tasking, and execution of massive robot swarms based on local communication, signal propagation, and stochastic reactions. This model is probabilistic, dynamic, fault-tolerant, efficient in computation, and can be easily tasked to deal with topology changes in the communication network and modify the global behaviors. Different from most existing distributed control and learning mechanisms, the DHM considers the topological structure of the organization, and supports dynamic re-configuration and self-organization. In the last year, we have formalized the concept of DHM and conducted experiments of simulating swarm behaviors in large scale for target attacking, network formation, self-repair, and avoid pitfalls in mission execution.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 14, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA422130
Entities
People
- Wei-min Shen
Organizations
- University of Southern California