Energy-saving decision making for aerial swarms: PSO-based navigation in vector fields

Abstract

This paper presents the Navigation Wind PSO (NW-PSO) as a search mechanism for aerial micro-robots with limited battery capacity acting in environments with unknown external dynamics (such as wind). The proposed method uses the concepts of multi-criteria decision making and let the individuals to decide on their movements almost following the flow with small course deviations in order to save as much energy as possible. One of the goals is to investigate how the arising premature energy-loss on individual level affects the performance of collective search. The experiments show that NW-PSO can save a good amount of energy as well as perform search behavior with good approximation of the global optimal solution almost without awareness regarding disturbance factors and particle loss.