Adaptive navigation in a heterogeneous swarm robotic system

We study a situation where a swarm of wheeled robots, the foot-bots, is deployed in an indoor environment to solve a foraging prob-lem, i.e., they need to go back and forth between a source and a target location. For the navigation between the two locations, they are as-sisted by a swarm of flying robots that can attach to the ceiling, the eye-bots. The eye-bots are deployed beforehand and form a grid on the ceiling between source and target. From their position on the ceil-ing they give directional instructions to the foot-bots on the ground. Since the topology of the terrain is different on the ceiling and on the ground, eye-bots cannot derive the instructions to give based on their own sensor feedback (e.g., distance scanner, or infrared communica-tion between eye-bots). Instead, we use an iterative solution whereby eye-bots give instructions to foot-bots and then observe the behavior and feedback of footbots to adapt the instructions they give. Throug