Gravity Points in Potential-Field Approaches to Self Organisation

One approach to the coordination of the movement of autonomous agents in self-organising systems is to use virtual potential fields, analagous to potential fields found in physics. Agents act as charged particles generating fields which other agents react to by ascending or descending the gradients of these fields, or by moving along equipotential lines. This approach has been suggested for free-flight air-traffic control, urban traffic management and modular robotics, among other applications. In this paper, we extend this approach by the addition of gravity points which overlay the agent-centric potential fields with additional fields for attracting or repelling agents. We demonstrate how the approach can be used to improve the efficiency of an algorithm for the self configuration of modular robots.