Performance of digital pheromones for swarming vehicle control

ABSTRACT

The use of digital pheromones for controlling and coordinating swarms of unmanned vehicles is studied under various conditions to determine their effectiveness in multiple military scenarios. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of these pheromone algorithms for surveillance, target acquisition, and tracking. The algorithms were demonstrated on hardware platforms and the results from the demonstration are reported

REFERENCES

• 1: Arquilla, J. and Ronfeldt, D. Swarming and the Future of Conflict. DB-311, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, 2000. Available at <u>http://www.rand.org/publications/DB/DB311.</u>
• 2: Eric Bonabeau , Marco Dorigo , Guy Theraulaz, Swarm intelligence: from natural to artificial systems, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY, 1999
• 3: Brueckner, S. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.
• 4: Scott Camazine , Nigel R. Franks , James Sneyd , Eric Bonabeau , Jean-Louis Deneubourg , Guy Theraula, Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001
• 5: Dubik, J., Richards, R., and Trinkle, G. Joint Concept Development and Experimentation. In Proceedings of Swarming: Network Enabled C4ISR, ASD C31, 2003.
• 6: Edwards, S. J. A. Swarming on the Battlefield: past, Present. and Future. MR-1100-OSD, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, 2000.
• 7: Grassé, P.-P. La Reconstruction du nid et les Coordinations Inter-Individuelles chez Bellicositermes Natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La théorie de la Stigmergie: Essai d'interprétation du Comportement des Termites Constructeurs. Insectes Sociaux, 6:41--84, 1959.
• 8: Inbody, D. Swarming: Historical Observations and Conclusions. In Proceedings of Swarming: Network Enabled C4ISR, ASD C3I, 2003.
• 9: Parunak, H. V. Making Swarming Happen. In Proceedings of Swarming: Network Enabled C4ISR, ASD C3I, 2003.
• 10: Parunak, H. V. D. 'Go to the Ant': Engineering Principles from Natural Agent Systems. Annals of Operations Research, 75:69--101, 1997.
• 11: Parunak, H. V. D. and Brueckner, S. Swarming Coordination of Multiple UAV's for Collaborative Sensing. In Proceedings of Second AIAA "Unmanned Unlimited" Systems, Technologies, and Operations Conference, AIAA, 2003.
• 12: H. Van Dyke Parunak , Sven A. Brueckner, Stigmergic Learning for Self-Organizing Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET's), Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, p.1324-1325, July 19-23, 2004, New York, New York [doi>10.1109/AAMAS.2004.253]
• 13: Parunak, H. V. D., Purcell, M., and O'Connell, R. Digital Pheromones for Autonomous Coordination of Swarming UAV's. In Proceedings of First AIAA Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles, Systems, Technologies, and Operations Conference, AIAA, 2002.
• 14: Payton, D., Daily. M., Hoff, B., Howard, M., and Lee, C. Autonomy-Oriented Computation in Pheromone Robotics. In Proceedings of Workshop on Autonomy-Oriented Computation (AOC), Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 69--77, 2001.
• 15: John A. Sauter , Robert Matthews , H. Van Dyke Parunak , Sven Brueckner, Evolving adaptive pheromone path planning mechanisms, Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 1, July 15-19, 2002, Bologna, Italy [doi>10.1145/544741.544841]
• 16: SMDC-BL-AS. Swarming Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Limited Objective Experiment (LOE). U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Battlelab, Studies and Analysis Division, Huntsville, AL, 2001. Available at https://home.je.jfcom.mil/QuickPlace/experimentation/PageL ibrary85256AB1003BBEA7.nsf/h_0036FB98FFD2ACCA85256AB2004161B0/D7680995272C266B85256B20004E1BF0/?OpenDocument.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.9 Robotics
          Subjects: Autonomous vehicles

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
autonomous vehicles, multiagent, pheromone control, swarming