Emergence of coherent motion in aggregates of motile coupled maps

TL;DR

This paper investigates how collective coherent motion emerges in systems of interacting motile units with adaptive steering, showing that a mix of order and chaos enhances group cohesion through self-organization.

Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear coupling mechanism that enables motile agents to transition between ordered and chaotic behaviors, leading to emergent collective coherence.

Findings

Coherent motion correlates with interparticle synchronization.

Higher coherence occurs when agents exhibit mixed ordered and chaotic behaviors.

Density and interparticle distance influence the degree of collective coherence.

Abstract

In this paper we study the emergence of coherence in collective motion described by a system of interacting motiles endowed with an inner, adaptative, steering mechanism. By means of a nonlinear parametric coupling, the system elements are able to swing along the route to chaos. Thereby, each motile can display different types of behavior, i.e. from ordered to fully erratic motion, accordingly with its surrounding conditions. The appearance of patterns of collective motion is shown to be related to the emergence of interparticle synchronization and the degree of coherence of motion is quantified by means of a graph representation. The effects related to the density of particles and to interparticle distances are explored. It is shown that the higher degrees of coherence and group cohesion are attained when the system elements display a combination of ordered and chaotic behaviors, which emerges from a collective self-organization process.