Deployment of a Full-Scale Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) Swarm System
Abstract
Utilizing large numbers of aerial agents simultaneously to assist the warfighter is a long term goal. Havinga multitude of agents assisting the warfighters offers advantages in situational awareness while enabling many new offensive and defensive capabilities. Situational awareness advantages include real-time visual, audio, and RF information supplied to the warfighters. This research project is concerned specifically with emergent behaviors in distributed robotic swarm systems to equip swarming UAVs with the ability to globally self- organize themselves through the use of only local interactions.While there is a significant body of work dedicated to emergent behaviors in swarm systems, we are not aware of any works that properly consider the physical aspect of robotic swarm systems; specifically the possibility of collisions. Many prominent works studying swarm systems simply consider agents as point masses in which multiple agents are allowed to occupy the same space. While in many applications this provides a suitable abstraction for modeling various swarm systems, this does not make sense for most physical swarm systems. In particular, this research project considers robotic swarm systems in which collisions disable the participating agents, and studies the e_ect of this added constraint on intended emergent behaviors. The goals of this research project are then to close this gap between theory and practice by designing and deploying a full-scale robotic swarm system of Lighter Than Air (LTA) agents capable of exhibiting various emergent behaviors without colliding with one another. More specifically, the goals of this research project are to:1. develop novel distributed stigmergic controllers for robotic multi-agent systems. The control theoretic focus of this project will be devoted to developing practical controllers that can be implemented on physical swarm systems with partial information to achieve various globally emergent properties.2. design and build a heterogeneous swarm of `Lighter Than Air (LTA) agents. The experimental focus of this project will be devoted to building a full-scale ad hoc swarm system. Specifically, the swarm system will require absolutely no infrastructure besides the agents themselves, and all sensing, communication, computation, and control will all be done on-board the agents themselves.3. deploy the heterogeneous swarm system to perform various tasks. The ultimate goal of this project is to bring together the theoretical and practical aspects of this problem once and for all. Specifically, we will co-design dynamic stigmergic controllers along with the agents they are needed in parallel.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 08, 2020
- Source ID
- N000142012507
Entities
People
- Cameron Nowzari
Organizations
- George Mason University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy