A Communication-Efficient Digital Twin Framework for PSO-Based Swarm Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance

arXiv:2406.19930v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Swarm-based target localization in industrial environments faces two major challenges: navigating obstacle-rich spaces and managing intensive communication among agents. This paper proposes a communication-efficient digital twin (DT) framework for Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based swarm navigation and obstacle avoidance. The DT, deployed on a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) server, maintains a virtual replica of the environment to provide global guidance and obstacle bypassing when agents become trapped or experience poor connectivity. By reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication and centralizing environmental information, the proposed framework improves both navigation efficiency and communication resource utilization. Simulation results demonstrate that the DT-assisted PSO with obstacle avoidance achieves faster convergence and significantly lower communication load compared with decentralized P2P and random-walk PSO approaches. These findings highlight the potential of integrating DT with swarm intelligence to enhance cooperative exploration in complex industrial scenarios such as chemical leakage localization.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-08-11