Flocking in Stationary and Non-stationary Environments: A Novel Communication Strategy for Heading Alignment

We propose a novel communication strategy inspired by explicit signaling mechanisms seen in vertebrates, in order to improve performance of self-organized flocking for a swarm of mobile robots. The communication strategy is used to make the robots match each other’s headings. The task of the robots is to coordinately move towards a common goal direction, which might stay fixed or change over time. We perform simulation-based experiments in which we evaluate the performance of flocking using the accuracy of the motion with respect to a given goal direction. In our settings, only a part of the robots are informed about the goal direction. Experiments are conducted in stationary and non-stationary environments. In the stationary environment, the goal direction and the informed robots do not change during the experiment. In the non-stationary environment, both the goal direction and the informed robots are changed over time. In both environments, the proposed strategy scales well with respect to the swarm size and is robust with respect to noise.