Design of Communication and Control for Swarms of Aquatic Surface Drones

Abstract

The availability of relatively capable and inexpensive hardware components has made it feasible to consider large-scale systems of autonomous aquatic drones for maritime tasks. In this paper, we present the CORATAM and HANCAD projects, which focus on the fundamental challenges related to communication and control in swarms of aquatic drones. We argue for: (i) the adoption of a heterogeneous approach to communication in which a small subset of the drones have long-range communication capabilities while the majority carry only short-range communication hardware, and (ii) the use of decentralized control to facilitate inherent robustness and scalability. A heterogeneous communication system and decentralized control allow for the average drone to be kept relatively simple and therefore inexpensive. To assess the proposed methodology, we are currently building 25 prototype drones from off-the-shelf components. We present the current hardware designs and discuss the results of simulation-based experiments involving swarms of up to 1,000 aquatic drones that successfully patrolled a 20 km-long strip for 24 hours.

Design and development of an inexpensive aquatic swarm robotics system

“…In large-scale swarms, different robots might be equipped with different types of communication capabilities and serve as gateways for the rest of the swarm [5], or a few of the robots may be equipped with different sensors payloads and share information with the neighboring robots [15]. Such approaches can allow for the increase of the swarm's capabilities, while keeping the cost of the average robot low.…”

“…The total cost of each unit is approximately 300 EUR in materials. To facilitate studies on control synthesis and swarming behavior for real-world robotic systems [5], we combined the robotic platform with our simulation framework, JBotEvolver [6].…”

A critical survey on marsupial robotic teams for environmental monitoring of water bodies

“…1,3). The ability of autonomous surface vehicles to perceive the far-field is limited by the low vantage point of their sensors, which is particularly stringent for small-and midsized vehicles [29] (e.g. see Fig.…”

Communication and networking technologies for UAVs: A survey

“…Communication infrastructure was designed using channels for broadcast, control, data, and co-operation, which provided links for communication between drones and the ground control station. Christensen et al [15] presented the Heterogeneous Ad-hoc Network for the Coordination of Aquatic Drones (HANCAD) and Control of Aquatic Drones for Maritime Tasks (CORATAM) projects, focusing on control of swarms of aquatic drones and the communication among them. One of the main goals of the projects was to enable Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) to be used with low-cost aquatic drones.…”