Effectiveness of Digital Pheromones Controlling Swarming Vehicles in Military Scenarios

摘要

The use of digital pheromones for controlling and coordinating swarms of unmanned vehicles has been studied under various conditions. This paper describes experiments that demonstrate their effectiveness in several militarily significant scenarios in simulation. The scenarios are described along with the results comparing the performance of swarming to traditional military tactics. A demonstration was conducted using these same algorithms to coordinate unmanned vehicles in a simulated exercise. Two air vehicles controlled by digital pheromones and four ground robots controlled by a related stigmergic algorithm successfully executed a two-hour multi-mission surveillance, patrol, target acquisition, and tracking scenario. The vehicles were given only high-level instructions, such as “survey this areaandidentifyandtrackanytargets”or“patrolaroundthisconvoy”.Theairvehicleswere abletodynamicallyadapttonewcommandsandcoordinatetheiractionswitheachotherand the ground robots to achieve the objectives. The algorithm’s robustness was demonstrated when it dynamically adjusted to the unplanned failure of one of the ground robots without any operator intervention.