Association Rules for a Swarming Behavior of Multiple Agents

This paper presents a framework for decentralized control of self-organizing swarm agents based on the artificial potential functions (APFs). The framework explores the benefits by associating agents based on position information to realize complex swarming behaviors. A key development is the introduction of a set of association rules by APFs that effectively deal with a host of swarming issues such as flexible and agile formation. In particular, this paper presents an association rule for swarming that requires less movements for each agent and compact formation among agents. Extensive simulations are presented to illustrate the viability of the proposed framework.