Completed Computing & AI Engineering

How can we make use of one or more computationally powerful virtual robots, to create a hive mind network to better coordinate multi-robot teams?

Funder EPSRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Bristol
Funding Not disclosed
Period Sept 2025 — Oct 2025

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A single cloud-based "queen" computer will coordinate teams of robots the way a queen bee directs a hive, processing data that individual robots cannot handle alone. This matters because multi-robot teams today struggle with coordination. Each robot typically has limited processing power, and communication between them becomes slow and unreliable as the team grows. The queen node model solves this by giving the swarm a central, powerful brain that can share data, monitor robot health, and direct behaviour—while individual robots still act independently for local tasks. If successful, this could improve real-world applications like search-and-rescue operations, warehouse logistics, or environmental monitoring, where large robot teams must adapt quickly without human oversight. The project will test whether multiple queen nodes can link separate robot teams to complete shared tasks, and will demonstrate the model outside the lab. This is fundamental robotics research. It does not promise an immediate product. But similar work on swarm intelligence has already influenced autonomous vehicle coordination and factory automation. A deeper understanding of how to blend centralised and distributed control could unlock more capable, resilient robot teams in settings where human intervention is impractical.

View original technical description
Project description: 1. Research Aim and Overview This research aims to take inspiration from bee colonies to develop a hive mind [1] network. The proposed network architecture makes use of a queen node, a virtual entity with a large computational resource (e.g. a cloud server) that all robots on the network can connect to. In a similar vein to the queen bee, the queen node can process data for the entire hive mind whilst the individual robots are only able to process data at a local level. The queen node may also be used for communicating information to the network, sharing data between robots, monitoring the status of robots, and controlling the behaviour of the network as a whole. The queen bee model will be combined with swarm robotics concepts whereby teams of robots operate in a distributed manner. This project aims to answer 3 key research questions, these have been written with the intention of addressing approximately one per year of the PhD: 1. How can we build a multi-robot team with an integrated queen node and what useful functions should the queen node complete? 2. Can this model be used to facilitate the communication between two or more multi-robot teams, each with their own queen node, to complete a shared task? 3. How can we demonstrate the queen node model's effectiveness on real world applications to improve swarm performance outside of the laboratory?

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Researchers

Henry Hickson (Student)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Hive Mind: A Framework for Problem Solving in Multi-Agent Systems
Coupled Navigation-Networking Techniques for Mobile Robot Systems
ROBOtic Replicants for Optimizing the Yield by Augmenting Living Ecosystems
Green Brain: Computational Modelling of the Honeybee Brain
Implicit and explicit communication for cooperation between humanoid robots

Original classification

Studentship

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