Collective motions of heterogeneous swarms

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how heterogeneous swarms of self-propelled agents exhibit collective motion and segregation, deriving bifurcation structures and validating them through simulations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of collective behaviors in heterogeneous swarms, including pattern formation and population segregation, based on a self-propulsion and attraction model.

Findings

Emergence of collective motion patterns

Segregation of different agent populations

Bifurcation analysis of swarming behaviors

Abstract

The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a swarm of self-propelled heterogeneous, delay-coupled agents. We show the emergence of collective motion patterns and segregation of populations of agents with different dynamic properties; both of these behaviors (pattern formation and segregation) emerge naturally in our model, which is based on self-propulsion and attractive pairwise interactions between agents. We derive the bifurcation structure for emergence of different swarming behaviors in the mean field as a function of physical parameters and verify these results through simulation.