This paper investigates the aggregated stability properties of of a system of multiple mobile agents described by simple dynamical systems. The agents are steered through local coordinating control laws that arise as a combination of attractive/repulsive and alignment forces. These forces ensure collision avoidance and cohesion of the group and result to all agents attaining a common heading an...

We describe further progress towards the development of a MAV (micro aerial vehicle) designed as an enabling tool to investigate aerial flocking. Our research focuses on the use of low cost off the shelf vehicles and sensors to enable fast prototyping and to reduce development costs. Details on the design of the embedded electronics and the modification of the chosen toy helicopter are presente...

We study a model of flocking in order to describe the transitions during the collective motion of organisms in three dimensions (e.g., birds). In this model the particles representing the organisms are self-propelled, i.e., they move with the same absolute velocity v0. In addition, the particles locally interact by choosing at each time step the average direction of motion of their neighbors an...

Flocking behavior in nature provides an example of perfectly graceful collective navigation. Inspired by this ability of the birds and the bees, we attempted to use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to “naturally” develop a neural network controller for swarms of robots. We constructed a framework consisting of a parallelized genetic algorithm (GA), a three–layer feed–forward neural ...

We study the emergent flocking behavior in a group of Cucker-Smale flocking agents under rooted leadership with alternating leaders. It is well known that the network topology regulates the emergent behaviors of flocks. All existing results on the Cucker-Smale model with leader-follower topologies assume a fixed leader during temporal evolution process. The rooted leadership is the most general...