A multi-agent adaptive protocol for femto-satellite applications

Abstract

Femto-satellites are a very promising category of satellites that weigh less than 100 grams. Also, a Pico-Rover it is a self-contained robot that weighs less than 1 kilogram and its motion works by rolling the external enclosure that keeps out any environment threats. The main advantage of this kind of small agents is the multi-point of view when they work as swarm or taking part of a larger constellation. The complexity of these kinds of network sensors, in addition to the low power requirements and low size, requires a good strategy of management that we want to present in this work. The paradigm on management-on-agent consists of a single high quality point of view and multiple low quality points of view where the selection of the point of view is done inside the network but decided externally to the network or done by a basic law. This approach optimizes the bandwidth used by the net. Instead of streaming every high quality point of view we only stream one of them. At the same time, this approach allows a task distribution on the network where there is only one producer agent, one consumer agent while the rest of agents work as relay nodes. This work is addressed, on one side, to the design of a simple but robust and adaptive protocol based on this paradigm; on the other hand, an implementation using a low performance platform like the 8051 microcontroller architecture is required.