Motion signals from one drone guide multiple drones in simulation
Waggle Dance Inspired Motion Communication for Multiple UAVs in MuJoCo
Robotics
Summary
The paper explores how drones can communicate using movements inspired by honeybee dances. The researchers built a drone simulation where one drone sends navigation messages through specific flight moves that other drones watch and interpret from their cameras. Several simulated drones can understand these movements, decode the intended message, and start moving accordingly. The experiments show it works in many cases but also point out challenges like recognizing movements in different shapes or angles.
What this means in practice
- •For drone fleet operators: Use motion-based broadcasts for drones to communicate navigation instructions without radio signals in environments where radio is constrained.
- •For robot design engineers: Design multi-robot systems that interpret movement patterns as communication signals for decentralized coordination.
Authors
Zhang Nengbo
Abstract
The honeybee waggle dance motivates a communication mechanism in which one agent's movement conveys spatial information that guides other agents' actions. This paper presents a MuJoCo system that extends the point-to-point motion communication setting of MoCom to one performer and multiple observers. A performer broadcasts a six-bit navigation payload using four flight primitives and explicit null signals. Each of one to five observers processes its own onboard RGB images, extracts optical-flow trajectories, recognizes symbols, parses the message, and starts navigation only after confirming its own complete frame. Reception states and execution triggers are separate across observers, while simulation control and safety checks use shared ground truth. With stationary observers, 25 Hz image input, and ideal state-feedback control, a fixed standard suite yielded 44 correct complete messages from 53 receiver exposures across 17 nominal broadcasts; 13 broadcasts passed all group-level decoding and execution checks. Three additional no-message or input-fault controls met their expected outcomes. A separately reported supplemental suite, using the same frozen code at the default geometry, achieved 14 successful receiver exposures across three broadcasts. Near-range and wide-angle configurations exposed tracking and recognition failures, while unsuccessful receivers remained stationary. These finite simulation results support the feasibility of a waggle-dance-inspired broadcast-to-action mechanism under the tested conditions and identify the present perceptual and protocol limits.