Secure and Resilient Swarms: Autonomous Decentralized Lightweight UAVs to the Rescue

Distributed systems disseminate emergent behaviors across an interconnected group of lightweight agents. The SHARKS protocol (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms) allows for a robotic swarm to encircle/ensphere a target. Motivated by security and resiliency, the SHARKS protocol addresses traditional vulnerabilities without creating a central point of vulnerability. The SHARKS protocol tolerates the loss of agents and continues to surround a target with as few as three individuals. Utilizing two movement algorithms, agents remain within a specified radial distance of the target while also evenly dispersing from their neighbors. SHARKS was tested in two-dimensional (2-D) and 3-D fields. In 2-D fields, the efficiency (how quickly the swarm stabilizes) and the capacity (the number of agents that can stabilize) were tested across different configurations. In 3-D fields, the stability was tested across many additional configurations based on when each swarm reached 68%, 95%, and 100% stability.