Challenges in Unmanned Systems Swarms: A Wireless, Multi-agent Distributed System Perspective

Abstract

Networked swarms may be considered as heterogeneous, distributed agent-based systems (or distributed wireless sensor networks), where the concept/definition of an ’agent’ may be interpreted in the most general sense. This is true for networked swarms of unmanned systems, as well as manned-unmanned systems, where the term ’agent’ may be thought of as (an individual) ’asset’. When considering swarms in (fixed or loose) 2-D/3-D formations, each swarm may be also thought of as a ’group of agents’ with initially specific, but dynamically and in real-time modifiable goals pertaining to an assigned mission or missions. As such, when studying such swarms, there are major challenges related to navigation and control, communications (including secured inter- and intra- swarm communication), coordination and collaboration, robustness and fault tolerance, security, to name just a few.

In this seminar, the ’connection’ between the swarm formation consideration and the ’distributed (agent-based) sensor network’ consideration will be established. Assets will be considered as sensor nodes, and the overall swarm as a sensor network. A well integrated methodology will be presented, in which on top of navigation/control aspects, communication and networking aspects as well as software security will be discussed. The swarm formation will be dictated / modified based on communication/data transmission requirements, in addition to control requirements. Further, it will be shown how networked swarms / distributed agent-based systems may be organized in architectures comprised of swarms, each containing a ’swarm head’ as leader with all ’swarm heads’ being connected via a backbone network.

Case studies of aerial, ground and aerial-ground unmanned vehicle swarms will be demonstrated experimentally.