TY  - EJOU
AU  - Maqbool, Ayesha 
AU  - Afzal, Farkhanda 
AU  - Rana, Tauseef 
AU  - Mirza, Alina 

TI  - Thermodynamics Inspired Co-operative Self-Organization of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles
T2  - Intelligent Automation \& Soft Computing

PY  - 2021
VL  - 28
IS  - 3
SN  - 2326-005X

AB  - This paper presents a co-operative, self-organisation method for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles aiming to share surveillance responsibilities. Spatial organization or formation configuration of multiple vehicles/agents’ systems is crucial for a team of agents to achieve their mission objectives. In this paper we present simple yet efficient thermodynamic inspired formation control framework. The proposed method autonomously allocates region of surveillance to each vehicle and also re-adjusts the area of their responsibilities during the mission. It provides framework for heterogeneous UAVs to scatter themselves optimally in order to provide maximum coverage of a given area. The method is inspired from a natural phenomenon of thermodynamics and presents a flexible and efficient mechanism for co-operative team formation. The idea here is to model the system as a collection of heat generating bodies and to maintain the constant system temperature across the system by introducing appropriate separation among vehicles. We also present the behavour of the algorithm with the communication constraint. The proposed method achieves special allocation objectives, even with constraint communication. It is further shown that the method can easily be adopted to arbitrary configurations according to mission requirements and team configuration. This co-operative decision making of allocating mission responsibilities by self-organising a team of vehicles adds to the overall autonomy of the Multi-vehicular system.
KW  - Autonomous vehicles; area coverage; nature-inspired algorithms; cooperative agents; self-organization; formation control

DO  - 10.32604/iasc.2021.017506