Nature-inspired self-organizing collision avoidance for drone swarm based on reward-modulated spiking neural network
Feifei Zhao, Yi Zeng, Bing Han, Hongjian Fang, Zhuoya Zhao
Abstract
Biological systems can exhibit intelligent swarm behavior through relatively independent individual, local interaction and decentralized decision-making. A major research challenge of self-organized swarm intelligence is the coupling influences between individual behaviors. Existing methods optimize the behavior of multiple individuals simultaneously from a global perspective. However, these methods lack in-depth inspiration from swarm behaviors in nature, so they are short of flexibly adapting to real multi-robot online decision-making tasks. To overcome such limits, this paper proposes a self-organized collision avoidance model for real drones incorporating a bio-inspired reward-modulated spiking neural network (RSNN). The local interaction and autonomous learning of a single individual leads to the emergence of swarm intelligence. We validated the proposed model on swarm collision avoidance tasks (a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles without central control) in a bounded space, carrying out simulation and real-world experiments. Compared with artificial neural network-based online learning methods, our proposed method exhibits superior performance and better stability.