Visually Guided Swarm Motion Coordination via Insect-inspired Small Target Motion Reactions

TL;DR

This paper presents a bio-inspired swarm control method based on insect visual neurons, enabling stable collective motion with minimal connectivity, validated through simulations and ground vehicle experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel insect-inspired small target motion reactive (STMR) control approach with theoretical stability analysis for multi-agent swarm coordination.

Findings

Achieves stable group motion with only local neighbor information.

Demonstrates decreasing heading variance in simulated and real-world tests.

Maintains collective behavior with minimal connectivity.

Abstract

Despite progress developing experimentally-consistent models of insect in-flight sensing and feedback for individual agents, a lack of systematic understanding of the multi-agent and group performance of the resulting bio-inspired sensing and feedback approaches remains a barrier to robotic swarm implementations. This study introduces the small-target motion reactive (STMR) swarming approach by designing a concise engineering model of the small target motion detector (STMD) neurons found in insect lobula complexes. The STMD neuron model identifies the bearing angle at which peak optic flow magnitude occurs, and this angle is used to design an output feedback switched control system. A theoretical stability analysis provides bi-agent stability and state boundedness in group contexts. The approach is simulated and implemented on ground vehicles for validation and behavioral studies. The results indicate despite having the lowest connectivity of contemporary approaches (each agent instantaneously regards only a single neighbor), collective group motion can be achieved. STMR group level metric analysis also highlights continuously varying polarization and decreasing heading variance.