Bio-inspired density control of multi-agent swarms via leader-follower plasticity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bio-inspired leader-follower density control method for large multi-agent swarms, utilizing role plasticity and PDE modeling to ensure stability and robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel, role-plasticity based control framework for swarm density regulation, with analytical guarantees and PDE modeling for scalability.

Findings

Control method is effective and robust in simulations.

Analytical guarantees for steady-state existence and stability.

Applicable to high-dimensional swarm systems.

Abstract

The design of control systems for the spatial self-organization of mobile agents is an open challenge across several engineering domains, including swarm robotics and synthetic biology. Here, we propose a bio-inspired leader-follower solution, which is aware of energy constraints of mobile agents and is apt to deal with large swarms. Akin to many natural systems, control objectives are formulated for the entire collective, and leaders and followers are allowed to plastically switch their role in time. We frame a density control problem, modeling the agents' population via a system of nonlinear partial differential equations. This approach allows for a compact description that inherently avoids the curse of dimensionality and improves analytical tractability. We derive analytical guarantees for the existence of desired steady-state solutions and their local stability for one-dimensional and higher-dimensional problems. We numerically validate our control methodology, offering support to the effectiveness, robustness, and versatility of our proposed bio-inspired control strategy.