Aerial Swarms

Abstract

This workshop will bring together the subsets of the two communities of multi-robot and bio-inspired swarms dealing specifically with systems of multiple aerial robots. The workshop aims to trigger a scientific discussion on the most recent advances and challenges of the science and technology of aerial swarms. We believe that the two aforementioned communities tackle remarkably similar problems but in different manners. The common problems they try to focus and solve are the ones of perception, estimation, control, and navigation of groups of UAVs in different environments. The multi-robot community often wants to ensure a particular configuration and performance tackling, for example, the swarming problem with tools from algebraic graph theory. Some of the works assume that the robots know their absolute positions and many assume that a robot can communicate with other members of the group. The bio-inspired community tries to tackle the same problem taking inspiration purely from biological systems. Therefore, they usually assume neither communication nor knowledge of the absolute positions of the agents. However, this community seldom implements the devised algorithms on real robotics systems. In general, we believe that there is not a gap between the two communities, but this workshop will try to highlight the differences in their approaches. The goal will be to share knowledge and understanding the main directions towards which the two communities are heading.