Swarm-based communication relay

Swarm-based communication relay

Context and purpose

Consider the situation in which multiple ships with sensing and communication capabilities must coordinate to collectively perform a task in a certain geographical area. The communication range of each ship is limited. While the maneuvers of the nodes are dictated by the task to be completed, this may lead to situations, in which one or more ships become disconnected from other ships. To restore the connectivity, so-called communication relays can be deployed. The picture below illustrates this. The connections between the ships are restored by a swarm of drones.

Task

The assignment concerns the design and implementation of a distributed application (swarm application) with the objective to maximize the capacity between the ships. In the design part an algorithm must be developed that will run on each drone. This algorithm must ‘sense’ the state of a its connections, share this state with other drones, fuse the total information and decide the new position of the drone to meet the objective. The algorithm will be implemented on an existing virtualized simulator. The correct functioning of the swarm application must be shown by a simple demonstration.

Work

40% theory, 40% implementation, 20% writing

Assignment can be done with multiple students, and it is possible to do the assignment at Thales in Hengelo.

Contact

Jan Laarhuis (j.h.laarhuis@utwente.nl)