Decentralized Control and Interactive Design Methods for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Self-Organizing Swarms

We present new methods of decentralized control and interactive design for artificial swarms of a large number of agents that can spontaneously organize and maintain non-trivial heterogeneous formations. Our model assumes no elaborate sensing, computation, or communication capabilities for each agent; the self-organization is achieved solely by simple kinetic interactions among agents. Specifications of the final formations are indirectly and implicitly woven into a list of different kinetic parameter settings and their proportions, which would be hard to obtain with a conventional top-down design method but may be designed heuristically through interactive design processes.