Hierarchical Swarm Robotics

摘要

Distributed computing is becoming more and more prevalent in engineering today. Swarm robotics is simply an extension of that, not only dividing the computing power, but also the physical capabilities. This project served as a proof of concept investigation into the feasibility and potential effectiveness of a hierarchical swarm topology (HST), which better mimics the organization of many societal structures. This goal was approached by designing a three-tier robotic swarm as well as a specialized abstract coverage algorithm designed to map an unknown area. Experiments were conducted by modifying various parameters of an HST including the number of tiers and robots per tier. Results supported the original hypothesis that by adding robots, overall runtime and individual workload is reduced.