Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) DivisionElectrical and Computer Engineering Program
RISC Laboratory
Date
2021-07-21Online Publication Date
2021-07-21Print Publication Date
2021-09Embargo End Date
2022-07-23Submitted Date
2021-06-14Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/670265
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Purpose of Review Currently, there is a large body of research on multi-agent systems addressing their different system theoretic aspects. Aerial swarms as one type of multi-agent robotic systems have recently gained huge interest due to their potential applications. However, aerial robot groups are complex multi-disciplinary systems and usually research works focus on specific system aspects for particular applications. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the main motivating applications that drive the majority of research works in this field, and summarize fundamental and common algorithmic components required for their development. Recent Findings Most system demonstrations of current aerial swarms are based on simulations, some have shown experiments using few 10 s of robots in controlled indoor environment, and limited number of works have reported outdoor experiments with small number of autonomous aerial vehicles. This indicates scalability issues of current swarm systems in real world environments. This is mainly due to the limited confidence on the individual robot’s localization, swarm-level relative localization, and the rate of exchanged information between the robots that is required for planning safe coordinated motions. Summary This paper summarizes the main motivating aerial swarm applications and the associated research works. In addition, the main research findings of the core elements of any aerial swarm system, state estimation and mission planning, are also presented. Finally, this paper presents a proposed abstraction of an aerial swarm system architecture that can help developers understand the main required modules of such systems.Citation
Abdelkader, M., Güler, S., Jaleel, H., & Shamma, J. S. (2021). Aerial Swarms: Recent Applications and Challenges. Current Robotics Reports. doi:10.1007/s43154-021-00063-4Sponsors
This publication has been produced benefiting from the 2232 International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers Program of TÜBİTAK (Project No.: 118C348).Journal
Current Robotics ReportsPubMed ID
PMC8294305PubMed Central ID
PMC8294305Additional Links
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43154-021-00063-4ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1007/s43154-021-00063-4