A Highly Resilient Framework for Autonomous Robotic Swarm Systems Operating in Unknown, Hostile Environments

Robotic swarm systems have many important applications, such as assisting with search and rescue missions, exploring space-based environments, etc. They provide the capability of performing tasks that may be beyond the means of individual robots, such as carrying heavy loads, maneuvering over complex terrains, etc. For mission-critical and/or safety-critical applications, it is important to ensure that the system deployed is highly dependable. In this paper, we present a highly resilient swarm system framework to support Resilient Operational Basis for Ultrahigh Survivable and Trustworthy (ROBUST) robotic swarm systems operating in unknown environments. The framework consists of important characteristics that are necessary for achieving ROBUST swarm systems operating in unknown, hostile environments in order to be able to dependably accomplish their specified missions.