Bio-inspired density control of multi-agent swarms via leader-follower plasticity
This addresses density control for swarm robotics and synthetic biology, offering a scalable solution with analytical insights, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing leader-follower paradigms.
The paper tackled the challenge of controlling spatial self-organization in large swarms of mobile agents by proposing a bio-inspired leader-follower method with role plasticity, deriving analytical guarantees for steady-state solutions and stability, and numerically validating its effectiveness and robustness.
The design of control systems for the spatial self-organization of mobile agents is an open challenge across several engineering domains, including swarm robotics and synthetic biology. Here, we propose a bio-inspired leader-follower solution, which is aware of energy constraints of mobile agents and is apt to deal with large swarms. Akin to many natural systems, control objectives are formulated for the entire collective, and leaders and followers are allowed to plastically switch their role in time. We frame a density control problem, modeling the agents' population via a system of nonlinear partial differential equations. This approach allows for a compact description that inherently avoids the curse of dimensionality and improves analytical tractability. We derive analytical guarantees for the existence of desired steady-state solutions and their local stability for one-dimensional and higher-dimensional problems. We numerically validate our control methodology, offering support to the effectiveness, robustness, and versatility of our proposed bio-inspired control strategy.