Dual-swarm features and its challenges for system of sensor networks and mobile multi-robots

A swarm is a decentralized and self-organized collective with lots of simple but autonomous and homogeneous individuals. Swarm intelligence is defined to describe its emergent behaviors. Both sensor networks and mobile multi-robots can have swarm features. The combination and cooperation of these two systems is a tendency recently. From the view of swarm organisms, the challenges of combination of sensor networks and mobile multi-robots are discussed and a layered dual-swarm framework is presented, which has a 3D communication structure, and which is possible to organically inherit traditional swarm technology while building an efficient interaction channel for both swarms to cooperatively work together. Finally, a control strategy based on virtual entities is introduced to induce and control the behaviors of the robot swarm through wireless sensor networks.