Research Projects

This proposal examines the issue of faulted-agent mitigation through the lens of Biologically Inspired Design.

Modern aerospace systems often approach problems by connecting many smaller agents, rather than using a single, more expensive platform. For example, it is often advantageous to have a fleet of lower-cost UAVs searching an area than a single, highly capable platform (airship). These sophisticated networks, however, are vulnerable to cascading faults.  For example, errors in data from a single UAV could lead the entire search party away from their intended target. Although recognized as a vulnerability for multi-agent systems, current fault-mitigation methods have significant limitations. Centralized monitoring methods are too computationally expensive and do not work well at large scale, while solutions that rely on agents reporting their own failures may not work in situations where the units are under attack or experiencing certain types of faults (e.g. communication failures). Additionally, current approaches often have strict assumptions that may not apply in real-world systems. As a result, large-scale aerospace systems are at risk of individual agent failures that can spread throughout the entire network, causing problems with system operation, and putting personnel in danger. This proposal examines the issue of faulted-agent mitigation through the lens of Biologically Inspired Design. The objective of this research is to investigate and evaluate a new biologically inspired approach to increase multi-agent system resilience. The Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis (OCR) or Zombie Ant Fungus provides an example of fault resilience in nature. The fungus infects the ant's nervous system and alters their behavior, ultimately leading to death. However, ant colonies have developed a unique foraging and organizational structure that contains the spread of the fungus. The central hypothesis is that an examination of colony response to OCR will allow derivation of information sharing protocols to increase multi-agent system resilience to fault propagation.