Stability Analysis of Swarms ina Noisy Environment

Abstract

Bees swarm when moving to their new nest site. Some birds flock during migration and some fish forage in schools. Groups of robots can work together cooperatively to perform tasks that a single robot could not (e.g., moving a large object). Groups of uninhabited autonomous air vehicles are currently being developed for military operations. Suppose that for simplicity we refer to groups of such “agents” as “swarms.” One key to the success of swarms is their ability to maintain cohesive behavior. There has been a significant amount of recent research activity on proving that cohesive group level behaviors (e.g., threat evasion, effective foraging) emerge from simple individual agent actions. Here we overview some of the research in this area and show how swarm cohesion can be characterized as a stability property and analyzed in a Lyapunov framework.