Nowzari developing controllers to facilitate emergent behavior in swarms

Cameron Nowzari, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to design and deploy a full-scale robotic swarm system of Lighter Than Air (LTA) agents capable of exhibiting various emergent behaviors without colliding with one another.

The experimental focus of this project will be devoted to building a full-scale ad hoc swarm system. Specifically, the swarm system will require absolutely no infrastructure besides the agents themselves, and all sensing, communication, computation, and control will be done on-board the agents themselves.

The ultimate goal of this work is to bring together the theoretical and practical aspects of this problem once and for all. Specifically, Nowzari and his collaborators will co-design dynamic stigmergic (indirectly coordinated) controllers along with the agents with which they need to be in parallel.

This project differs from similar research on this topic in that many prominent works studying swarm systems simply consider agents as point masses in which multiple agents are allowed to occupy the same space. While in many applications this provides a suitable abstraction for modeling various swarm systems, this does not make sense for most physical swarm systems. In particular, this research project considers robotic swarm systems in which collisions disable the participating agents, and studies the effect of this added constraint on intended emergent behaviors.

Nowzari will receive $275,769 total funding from the U.S. Department of the Navy for this project. Funding began in January 2020 and will conclude in July 2022.

###