Heterogeneous Collaborative Swarms of Autonomous Agents with Varying Capabilities

The overall purpose of this paper is to develop a heterogeneous collaborative swarm of entities with varying capabilities operating within different levels of information clouds where knowledge is shared either between vehicles, between vehicles and base stations, or between different clouds. The entities, or agents, may be of robot form (ground, air or sea vehicles) or human form and will have different specializations for knowledge gathering and sharing. Agents will combine to make a single group or collection of groups to form the entire Swarm as they work individually or collectively to accomplish various goals. The Swarm will consist of two levels of information clouds, one global and many local, that allow information to be collected and shared. The local cloud may be a collective cloud, where all information is stored via a single entity such as a base station while individual agents may communicate with each other, or the cloud may be disjointed where information is only sent and the relevant knowledge is received by individual agents The local clouds will all be connected via a single global cloud where information is sent to a central database and operations center. At the global cloud level, information is used to decide on mission objectives or is passed to other clouds to be used. Research will focus on the different aspects of the two cloud types, how knowledge is shared and used, and how each agent reacts to the information given mission parameters.