Biologically inspired flocking of swarms with dynamic topology in uniform environments

In this paper, we present a biologically inspired general controller for a swarm of mobile agents with dynamic topology moving in a given environment. Based on some observations and hypothesis about the natural phenomena of swarming, we propose a general decentralized controller for the swarm members to achieve the collective group behavior. We assume that during swarm´s motion, each agent can sense and interact with its nearest neighbors while following the path clues of the environment. Under the assumptions of connected graph and uniform environment that has identical effect on all agents, the controller is proved to enable the velocity vectors of all agents to converge to a common value. The advantage of this general controller is that all information it needs can be locally sensed, therefore, communication link and related issues (such as time delay) are avoided. Simulations are presented to verify the proposed controller.