ULTRA-LOW COMPLEXITY CONTROL MECHANISMS FOR SENSOR NETWORKS AND ROBOTIC SWARMS

Abstract

Biologically inspired swarms of autonomous robots have been used successfully in a variety of robotic applications ranging from various kinds of ground-based robots, to unmanned aerial vehicles. Typically, all of these systems use digital communications among swarm agents to implement their behavioral rules (e.g., because they need to exchange information about the location of agents). In this paper, we propose a general control architecture for ultra-low complexity robotic swarms that can be fully implemented in analog hardware and does not require digital communication for any part of the swarm coordination. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms both in simulations and on a robotic swarm platform for a variety of applications, ranging from area coverage, to target tracking, target interception or target enclosure, to active exploration and target finding, among others. The proposed system is extremely simple, robust, and scales well. It allows for homogeneous and heterogeneous swarms and has been successfully applied in several physical instantiations.