02 November 2025
Swarm robotics, inspired by swarms in nature, has the potential for resilient, robust, and redundant solutions to a wide range of problems such as mapping, logistics, search and rescue, disaster recovery, and environmental monitoring. Many relatively simple and cheap robots, each following simple rules, with local interactions between themselves and the environment can produce a desired emergent swarm-level behaviour. Building a distributed spatial awareness within a swarm of locally sensing and communicating robots enables new swarm algorithms.
In this work, EMERGE partners from the University of Bristol use local observations by robots of each other and Gaussian Belief Propagation message passing combined with continuous swarm movement to build a global and distributed swarm-centric frame of reference. With low bandwidth and computation requirements, this shared reference frame allows new swarm algorithms. The authors characterise the system in simulation and demonstrate two example algorithms.
Read the paper in the link below.
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