Adaptive hierarchical distributed control with cooperative task allocation for robot swarms

We present an adaptive hierarchical distributed control strategy (AHDC) enabling a small swarm of mobile robots to explore and track very large target clouds. The hierarchical distributed control architecture (HDC) is designed to govern not only robot behaviours but also their neighbourhood connectivities for global network integrity preservation. A mobile robot equipped with the HDC is capable of adaptively pruning neighbourhood connectivities so the robot can deal with complexity and constraints of local connectivity topologies. A cooperative target observation, tracking, and release (COTR) algorithm is incorporated into the HDC to allow a robot to track more than one target in large target clouds. We have demonstrated and evaluated effectiveness of the AHDC through both simulation and real-world experiments.