Stable flocking of swarms using local information

In this paper, we investigate the mechanism of the phenomena of swarm flocking, which can be widely observed in such as schooling fish and flocking migrate birds in nature. By combining the ideas of virtual force and nearest neighborhood law, we propose a decentralized controller to explain such phenomena. This decentralized controller can enable all swarm members to converge to a common velocity with bounded errors, no matter the swarm topology is fixed or dynamic. The advantage of this controller is that it just needs local information to achieve the stable group behavior. Simulation results are included to verify the proposed controller.