Coherent Swarming from Local Interaction by Exploiting Molecular Dynamics and Stokesian Dynamics Methods

This paper discusses a fully decentralized algorithm able to create a coherent swarm of autonomous mobile robots from the viewpoint of "computational physics". To this end, we particularly focus on the "Molecular Dynamics method" and the "Stokesian Dynamics method", both of which are widely used to investigate multi-body systems. To verify the feasibility of our approach, this idea has been implemented to a swarm of 2-D radio-connected autonomous mobile robots as a practical example. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can control the shape of the swarm appropriately according to the current situation without losing the coherence of the swarm nor exchanging any global information among the modules. Furthermore, we have found that the local interaction which is used to exploit Stokesian Dynamics plays an essential role in order to maintain the coherence of the swarm particularly under an unstructured environment.