A Stigmergic Optimization Method for Distributed Collaboration in Satellite Swarm

Distributed collaboration for satellite swarm has good robustness, parallelism, and execution capability, but its performance is still somehow limited. How to reduce the reliance of distributed collaboration on a large amount of information interaction and computational support becomes a difficult point to constrain the collaboration of a satellite swarm. Stigmergy is a bionic-based distributed general collaboration mechanism in swarm intelligence, which can effectively improve the communication efficiency and break the bottleneck of communication of swarm system. In this paper, based on the stigmergy mechanism, an implicit communication method containing multiple semantic information for satellite swarm is established. Meanwhile, based on the implicit communication method, a satellite swarm collaboration mechanism (SSCM) is proposed. Finally, a satellite swarm collaborative task scenario is simulated based on SSCM. In a discrete grid map, multiple satellites collaborate in a distributed manner via digital pheromones for the “detection-imaging” task chain. The simulation results show that SSCM performs well in task execution rate and target coverage, with improvements of up to 30.8% and 44% compared to others. The simulation experiments validate the robustness and applicability of SSCM, and the experiment has some scalability in problem scale.