Communication and Control for Swarms of Aquatic Surface Drones: the HANCAD and CORATAM projects

The availability of relatively capable and inexpensive hardware components has made it feasible to consider large-scale systems of autonomous aquatic drones for maritime tasks. In this paper, we present the HANCAD and CORATAM projects, which focus on the fundamental challenges related to communication and control in swarms of aquatic drones. We argue for (i) the adoption of a heterogeneous approach to communication in which a small subset of the drones have long-range communication capabilities while the majority carry only short-range communication hardware, and (ii) the use of decentralized control based on self-organization to facilitate inherent robustness and scalability. A heterogeneous communication system and decentralized control allow for the average drone to be kept relative simple and therefore inexpensive. To assess the proposed methodology, we are currently building 25 prototype drones from off-theshelf components. We present the current hardware designs and discuss the results of simulation-based experiments involving swarms of up to 1,000 aquatic drones that successfully patrolled a 20 km long strip for 24 hours.