Over-the-Air Updates for Robotic Swarms

Along with the growing number of robotic devices introduced by automation and the Internet of Things has come the growth of interest in methods and tools for deploying code updates to active sensor arrays and swarms of robots. This article presents a toolset that can perform an over-the-air code update of the robots in a swarm while the swarm is active, without interrupting the swarm’s mission. Each update is generated as a patch of the currently deployed code. A consensus mechanism borrowed from swarm intelligence ensures that, at any given time, all robots in the swarm run the same code version. Simulations were conducted with thousands of units to study the scalability and bandwidth consumption of the update process. Real deployment experiments were then performed on a small swarm of commercial quadcopters. This article is part of a theme issue on release engineering.