Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Controlling a robot swarm with a single remote controller is a challenging task, especially under unstable communication conditions where agents can temporarily lose the control signal, necessitating robust decentralized mechanisms for formation maintenance. This paper presents and tests a semi-centralized control system that enables an operator to coordinate the entire swarm as a unified entity. The system integrates centralized commands from a base station with decentralized position correction via the ESP-NOW protocol. To compare performance in maintaining a rigid formation, the Local Voting Protocol (LVP) and its Accelerated version (ALVP) were applied. Their effectiveness was evaluated in a simulation environment with a group of four drones through experiments involving sharp maneuvers (50° and 75° turns) and significant data packet loss simulations (50% and 80%). The results demonstrate that the Accelerated Local Voting Protocol (ALVP) offers significant advantages over the standard LVP, including faster formation recovery, lower mean positioning error, and greater stability. Specifically, in a series of 20 flight tests with a 50° turn, ALVP successfully maintained the formation in 17 cases, compared to only 3 for LVP, and also showed superior robustness under packet loss conditions. Therefore, the proposed semi-centralized approach using the ALVP protocol is an effective and robust solution for swarm formation control. Future work will focus on conducting physical experiments and integrating obstacle avoidance mechanisms.
Source: Informatics and Automation
DOI: 10.15622/ia.24.4.2
Authors: Ivan Arkhipov, Victoria Erofeeva, Oleg Granichin, Vladimir Kiselev, Andrey Chernov
Institution: St Petersburg University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413316717