Bio-inspired compact swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles without communication and external localization

Abstract This article presents a unique framework for deploying decentralized and infrastructure-independent swarms of homogeneous aerial vehicles in the real world without explicit communication. This is a requirement in swarm research, which anticipates that global knowledge and communication will not scale well with the number of robots. The system architecture proposed in this article employs the ultraviolet direction and ranging technique to directly perceive the local neighborhood for direct mutual localization of swarm members. The technique allows for decentralization and high scalability of swarm systems, such as can be observed in fish schools, bird flocks, or cattle herds. The bio-inspired swarming model that has been developed is suited for real-world deployment of large particle groups in outdoor and indoor environments with obstacles. The collective behavior of the model emerges from a set of local rules based on direct observation of the neighborhood using onboard sensors only. The model is scalable, requires only local perception of agents and the environment, and requires no communication among the agents. Apart from simulated scenarios, the performance and usability of the entire framework is analyzed in several real-world experiments with a fully-decentralized swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed in outdoor conditions. To the best of our knowledge, these experiments are the first deployment of decentralized bio-inspired compact swarms of UAVs without the use of a communication network or shared absolute localization. The entire system is available as open-source at https://github.com/ctu-mrs.