Cofields: a physically inspired approach to motion coordination

As computing becomes increasingly pervasive, autonomous computers are going to be embedded in everyday objects in our physical environment. In such scenarios, mobility itself will be pervasive. Mobile users, mobile devices, computer-enabled vehicles, and mobile software components will define a dynamic, networked world in which a large set of autonomous components will interact with each other to orchestrate their activities. We focus on the problem of coordinating autonomous agent's movements in a distributed environment. Orchestrating mobile autonomous agents can take inspiration from the laws of physics. Agent's movements could be driven by locally perceived computational force fields, or cofields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated through an embedded infrastructure.