This paper presents an investigation of flocking, the formation and maintenance of coherent group movement, by teams of autonomous mobile robots using principles of Swarm Intelligence. First, we present a simple flocking task, and we describe a leaderless distributed flocking algorithm (LD) that is more conducive to implementation on embodied agents than the established algorithms used in compu...

In this paper, we present a unified theoretical view of the so-called “Flocking Rules of Reynolds” introduced in 1987. No equations describing the rules or mathematical models of the mobile agents known as “boids” were presented in the original work by Reynolds. We show how to model a group of autonomous mobile agents by dynamic nets and achieve flocking by dissipation of the structural energy ...

The work of this paper is inspired by the flocking phenomenon observed in Reynolds (1987). We introduce a class of local control laws for a group of mobile agents that result in: (i) global alignment of their velocity vectors, (ii) convergence of their speeds to a common one, (iii) collision avoidance, and (iv) local minimization of the agents artificial potential energy. These are made possibl...

The theory of agreement or consensus problems for multi-agent systems has emerged as a challenging new area of research in recent years. It is a basic yet fundamental problem in decentralized control of networks of dynamic agents and has attracted great attention of researchers. This is partly due to its broad applications in cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles, formation control of mo...

This study investigates the pros and cons of flocking in longrange “migration” of mobile robot swarms under the influence of different factors. We present a flocking behavior consisting of three simple behaviors: heading alignment, proximal control, and alignment to the desired homing direction. The behavior drives a flock of robots from one location to another by sensing the magnetic field of ...

In this paper, we describe and simulate a number of algorithms created to address problems in distributed control systems. Based on tools from matrix theory, algebraic graph theory and control theory, a brief introduction is provided on consensus, rendezvous, and flocking protocols, and Dubins vehicle model. Recent results are then shown by simulating and enhancing various multi-agent dynamic s...

SUMMARY In this paper, the recent developments on distributed coordination control, especially the consensus and formation control, are summarized with the graph theory playing a central role, in order to present a cohesive overview of the multi-agent distributed coordination control, together with brief reviews of some closely related issues including rendezvous/alignment, swarming/flocking an...

We propose a biologically inspired, distributed coordination scheme based on nearest-neighbor interactions for a set of mobile kinematic agents equipped with vision sensors. It is assumed that each agent is only capable of measuring the following three quantities relative to each of its nearest neighbors (as defined by a proximity graph): time-to-collision, a single optical flow vector and rela...