Related papers: On Steering Swarms
Swarm guidance addresses a challenging problem considering the navigation and control of a group of passive agents. To solve this problem, shepherding offers a bio-inspired technique of navigating such group of agents by using external…
Collective migration of cells and animals often relies on a specialised set of "leaders", whose role is to steer a population of naive followers towards some target. We formulate a continuous model to understand the dynamics and structure…
This paper introduces a novel bio-mimetic approach for distributed control of robotic swarms, inspired by the collective behaviors of swarms in nature such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. The agents are assumed to have limited…
Contemporary swarm indicators are often used in isolation, focused on extracting information at the individual or collective levels. Consequently, these are seldom integrated to infer a top-level operating picture of the swarm, its members,…
Here we consider the communications tactics appropriate for a group of agents that need to "swarm" together in a highly adversarial environment. Specfically, whilst they need to cooperate by exchanging information with each other about…
Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…
This paper describes a technique for the autonomous mission planning of unmanned aerial system swarms. Given a swarm operating in a known area, a central command system generates measurements from the swarm. If those measurements indicate…
This paper describes a technique for the autonomous mission planning of robotic swarms in high risk environments where agent disablement is likely. Given a swarm operating in a known area, a central command system generates measurements…
This paper introduces a probabilistic guidance approach for the swarm-to-swarm engagement problem. The idea is based on driving the controlled swarm towards an adversary swarm, where the adversary swarm aims to converge to a stationary…
Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot…
This paper addresses the need for fast, lightweight, vision-guided swarming under limited computation and no explicit communication network or position source. The study develops a multi-agent optic flow sensing framework, then integrates…
Microrobotics has the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present unique…
The problem of guiding a flock of agents to a destination by the repulsion forces exerted by a smaller number of external agents is called the shepherding problem. This problem has attracted attention due to its potential applications,…
We present a model for controlling swarms of mobile agents via broadcast control, assumed to be detected by a random set of agents in the swarm. The agents that detect the control signal become ad-hoc leaders of the swarm. The agents are…
The problem of near-optimal distributed path planning to locally sensed targets is investigated in the context of large swarms. The proposed algorithm uses only information that can be locally queried, and rigorous theoretical results on…
This paper addresses a task allocation problem for a large-scale robotic swarm, namely swarm distribution guidance problem. Unlike most of the existing frameworks handling this problem, the proposed framework suggests utilising local…
This report studies the emergent behavior of systems of agents performing cyclic pursuit controlled by an external broadcast signal detected by a random set of the agents. Two types of cyclic pursuit are analyzed: 1)linear cyclic pursuit,…
Self-organization of a biologically motivated swarm into smaller subgroups of different velocities is found by solving a 1-dimensional adaptive-velocity swarm, in which the velocity of an agent is averaged over a finite local radius of…
This paper considers cooperative control of robots involving two different testbed systems in remote locations with communication on the internet. This provides us the capability to exchange robots status like positions, velocities and…
Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…