Evolving a team of self-organizing UAVs to address spatial coverage problems

An example for engineering a distributed algorithm using evolutionary methods was presented at the European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2012). The task was to evolve a distributed control algorithm for flying UAV drones to cover an area. The problem of having multiple mobile agents covering (or as we say in robotics, "sweeping") an area is relevant for many applications like lawn mowing, snow removal, floor cleaning, environmental monitoring, communication assistance and several military and security applications. The work by Istvan Fehervari, Wilfried Elmenreich and Evsen Yanmaz describes a simple grid-based abstraction of the problem which was used to test two evolved and one handcrafted control algorithm in comparison to reference algorithms like random walk and random direction.

 Slides (via slideshare):

I. Fehérvári, W. Elmenreich, and E. Yanmaz. Evolving a team of self-organizing UAVs to address spatial coverage problems. In R. M. Bichler, S. Blachfellner, and W. Hofkirchner, editors, European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research Book of Abstracts (ISSN: 2227-7803), Vienna, Austria, April 2012.