Project description
Information-theoretic principles for UAV swarms with synchronised behaviour
Creating large UAV swarms with synchronised behaviour is challenging. The influential neighbourhoods theory provides a strategy for maintaining group cohesion, reducing cognitive load, and guiding self-organised collective motion. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the BUGI project aims to develop a framework for designing UAV swarms using information-theoretic principles. These principles include empowerment, relevant information, and the bio-inspired influential neighbourhood principle. The project focuses on creating control mechanisms for guiding collective motion and establishing measures for characterising swarm cohesion in real-time. The goal is to enable the development of adaptive and scalable UAV swarms that can maintain cohesion in uncertain and complex dynamic environments.
Objective
Autonomous UAV swarms emerge as a disruptive technology with impact on many areas of our life, from monitoring key ecosystems and hazardous environments to enabling advanced data insights. However, creating large, decentralized UAV swarms with synchronized flocking behavior and autonomous collision avoidance is a challenge. This project aims to develop a holistic framework for supporting the design of UAV swarms based on generic information-theoretic principles - empowerment and relevant information - complemented with the bio-inspired influential neighbourhood principle. The key objectives are to design locally optimized control mechanisms guiding the collective motion and to provide theoretical measures for real-time characterization of swarm cohesion. The influential neighborhoods theory provides an efficient strategy for maintaining group cohesion in the coordinated motion of animal groups. It allows agents to limit their attention to a small subset of their neighbors, reducing information processing and cognitive load and offers explicit and concise models that can be implemented directly. Empowerment models agents behaviour with the principle of keeping ones options open, assuming that, maximizing the future potential outcome of ones actions is a survivability driver in nature. Relevant information provides a measure, quantifying the minimal amount of information an agent needs to process in order to achieve a certain level of utility. Identifying influential neighbourhoods dynamically will serve as a base for maximizing agents empowerment which will guide the UAV swarm self-organized collective motion. The integration of relevant information, influential neighbourhood identification and empowerment maximization into a novel principled framework for optimizing agents decision-making will provide enablers for the future adaptive and scalable UAV swarms, maintaining swarm cohesion while manoeuvring in uncertain and complex dynamic environments.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
75794 Paris
France