Hierarchical Connectivity Maintenance in Swarm Systems

The organization and control of swarm systems have been either completely decentralized where all the robots use only local observation and simple rules for coordination and cooperation which leads to emergent behavior. There are advantages to using this decentralized paradigm such as redundancy, scalability, and simplicity, but such systems tend to be slow and difficult to manage. On the other hand, using centralized systems in multi-robotic systems gives the ability to have a leader which makes managing the swarm easier and allows for faster task completion, but such systems tend to be difficult to scale and prone to failures. All in all, both methods’ disadvantages have hindered swarms to be widely applied in practice. Using a combination of these two points of view, we propose a hierarchical approach where the top-level agents are specialized in terms of hardware or compute power, and bottom-level agents are relatively simple. We plan to investigate this in the context of connectivity maintainance where agents in top level are intermittently connected and agents in the bottom level are continously connected.

Faculty Supervisor:

Giovanni Beltrame

Student:

Partner:

The University of Sheffield

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education

University:

Polytechnique Montréal

Program: