Improving Pheromone Communication for UAV Swarm Mobility Management

in 13th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI 2021) (2021)

Automating the Design of Efficient Distributed Behaviours for a Swarm of UAVs

in IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, Canberra 1-4 December 2020 (2020, December)

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. The vast majority considers a single UAV, which comes with several constraints such as its range of ... [more ▼]

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. The vast majority considers a single UAV, which comes with several constraints such as its range of operations or the number of sensors it can carry. Using multiple autonomous UAVs simultaneously as a swarm makes it possible to overcome these limitations. However, manually designing complex emerging behaviours like swarming is a difficult and tedious task especially for such distributed systems which performance is hardly predictable. This article therefore proposes to automate the design of UAV swarming behaviours by defining a multi-objective optimisation problem, so called Coverage of a Connected-UAV Swarm (CCUS), and designing a Q-Learning based Hyper-Heuristic (QLHH) for generating distributed CCUS heuristics. Experimental results demonstrate the capacity of QLHH to generate efficient heuristics for any instance from a given class. [less ▲]

Performance Analysis of Distributed and Scalable Deep Learning

in 20th IEEE/ACM Intl. Symp. on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid'20) (2020, May)

With renewed global interest for Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, the past decade has seen a myriad of new programming models and tools that enable better and faster Machine Learning (ML). More ... [more ▼]

With renewed global interest for Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, the past decade has seen a myriad of new programming models and tools that enable better and faster Machine Learning (ML). More recently, a subset of ML known as Deep Learning (DL) raised an increased interest due to its inherent ability to tackle efficiently novel cognitive computing applications. DL allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn in an automated way representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction, and can deliver higher predictive accuracy when trained on larger data sets. Based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), DL is now at the core of state of the art voice recognition systems (which enable easy control over e.g. Internet-of- Things (IoT) smart home appliances for instance), self-driving car engine, online recommendation systems. The ecosystem of DL frameworks is fast evolving, as well as the DL architectures that are shown to perform well on specialized tasks and to exploit GPU accelerators. For this reason, the frequent performance evaluation of the DL ecosystem is re- quired, especially since the advent of novel distributed training frameworks such as Horovod allowing for scalable training across multiple computing resources. In this paper, the scalability evaluation of the reference DL frameworks (Tensorflow, Keras, MXNet, and PyTorch) is performed over up-to-date High Performance Comput- ing (HPC) resources to compare the efficiency of differ- ent implementations across several hardware architectures (CPU and GPU). Experimental results demonstrate that the DistributedDataParallel features in the Pytorch library seem to be the most efficient framework for distributing the training process across many devices, allowing to reach a throughput speedup of 10.11 when using 12 NVidia Tesla V100 GPUs when training Resnet44 on the CIFAR10 dataset. [less ▲]

Evolving a Deep Neural Network Training Time Estimator

in Communications in Computer and Information Science (2020, February)

We present a procedure for the design of a Deep Neural Net- work (DNN) that estimates the execution time for training a deep neural network per batch on GPU accelerators. The estimator is destined to be ... [more ▼]

We present a procedure for the design of a Deep Neural Net- work (DNN) that estimates the execution time for training a deep neural network per batch on GPU accelerators. The estimator is destined to be embedded in the scheduler of a shared GPU infrastructure, capable of providing estimated training times for a wide range of network architectures, when the user submits a training job. To this end, a very short and simple representation for a given DNN is chosen. In order to compensate for the limited degree of description of the basic network representation, a novel co-evolutionary approach is taken to fit the estimator. The training set for the estimator, i.e. DNNs, is evolved by an evolutionary algorithm that optimizes the accuracy of the estimator. In the process, the genetic algorithm evolves DNNs, generates Python-Keras programs and projects them onto the simple representation. The genetic operators are dynamic, they change with the estimator’s accuracy in order to balance accuracy with generalization. Results show that despite the low degree of information in the representation and the simple initial design for the predictor, co-evolving the training set performs better than near random generated population of DNNs. [less ▲]

Emerging Inter-Swarm Collaboration for Surveillance Using Pheromones and Evolutionary Techniques

in Sensors (2020), 20(9), 2566

Optimizing the Performance of an Unpredictable UAV Swarm for Intruder Detection

in Optimization and Learning - Third International Conference, OLA 2020, Cádiz, Spain, February 17-19, 2020, Proceedings (2020)

Autonomous Flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Evolutionary Algorithms

in High Performance Computing (2020)

This article explores the application of evolutionary algorithms and agent-oriented programming to solve the problem of searching and monitoring objectives through a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles. The ... [more ▼]

This article explores the application of evolutionary algorithms and agent-oriented programming to solve the problem of searching and monitoring objectives through a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles. The subproblem of static off-line planning is studied to find initial flight plans for each vehicle in the fleet, using evolutionary algorithms to achieve compromise values between the size of the explored area, the proximity of the vehicles, and the monitoring of points of interest defined in the area. The results obtained in the experimental analysis on representative instances of the surveillance problem indicate that the proposed techniques are capable of computing effective flight plans. [less ▲]

A Q-Learning Hyper-Heuristic for UAV Swarming

Scientific Conference (2020)

Automated design of efficient swarming behaviours: a Q-learning hyper-heuristic approach

in GECCO '20: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Cancún, Mexico, July 8-12, 2020 (2020)

A Cooperative Coevolutionary Approach to Maximise Surveillance Coverage of UAV Swarms

in IEEE 17th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference CCNC 2020, Las Vegas, NV, USA, January 10-13, 2020 (2020)