A flexible decentralised communication architecture on a field programmable gate array for swarm system simulations

Swarm systems consist of a number of relatively simple agents that interact with each other to afford a complex behaviour. Such swarm systems are inherently parallel but as yet little work has focussed on the development of specific hardware platforms that might take advantage of such parallelism. This paper proposes a hardware platform for the implementation of swarm system simulations, using a case study of Reynolds´ boids. Our platform provides a flexible decentralised intelligent bus communication architecture designed to provide effective communication between agents on a hardware platform.