Self-organizing nervous systems for robot swarms

We present the self-organizing nervous system (SoNS), a robot swarm architecture based on self-organized hierarchy. The SoNS approach enables robots to autonomously establish, maintain, and reconfigure dynamic multilevel system architectures. For example, a robot swarm consisting of n independent robots could transform into a single n–robot SoNS and then into several independent smaller SoNSs, where each SoNS uses a temporary and dynamic hierarchy. Leveraging the SoNS approach, we showed that sensing, actuation, and decision-making can be coordinated in a locally centralized way without sacrificing the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance, for which swarm robotics is usually studied. In several proof-of-concept robot missions—including binary decision-making and search and rescue—we demonstrated that the capabilities of the SoNS approach greatly advance the state of the art in swarm robotics. The missions were conducted with a real heterogeneous aerial-ground robot swarm, using a custom-developed quadrotor platform. We also demonstrated the scalability of the SoNS approach in swarms of up to 250 robots in a physics-based simulator and demonstrated several types of system fault tolerance in simulation and reality.