Self-organising impact boundaries in ageless aerospace vehicles

ABSTRACT

Self-monitoring, self-repairing aerospace vehicles require modular, flexible and adaptive sensing and communication networks. In general, a modular (multi-cellular) sensing and communication network is expected to detect and react to impact location, energy and damage over a wide range of impacts. It is critical that global response emerges as a result of interactions involving transfer of information embedded locally, avoiding single points-of-failure. This work presents mechanisms ensuring self-organisation of autonomous cells into robust and continuously connected impact boundaries. The spatiotemporal stability is demonstrated for a variety of cell shapes in a dynamic environment with varying energy dissipation and damage probability models.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
impact detection, self-organisation, sensor networks