Swarm-Inspired Cooperative Mapping for Urban Autonomous Navigation

Urban autonomous vehicles today largely rely on individually built maps or centralized cloud services—both rigid under intermittent connectivity and rapid scene changes (construction, pop-up events). Inspired by how ant colonies collectively explore, we introduce a decentralized protocol: each vehicle broadcasts compressed “map particles” embedded with virtual pheromone values that highlight zones of high uncertainty or recent change. Neighboring vehicles incorporate these signals to prioritize sensing and route planning. A lightweight consensus algorithm merges local graphs into a shared dynamic map, resilient to network splits. The result, a bio-inspired SLAM that enables fleets to adapt on the fly to evolving cityscapes, boosting safety, efficiency, and robustness.