Flocking of Mobile Agents Using a New Interaction Model: A Cyber-Physical Perspective

The attraction repulsion (AR) model has been a common mathematical framework to emulate the interactions among mobile agents and to design rigid flocking laws. A main drawback of the AR model is that environment effects are not taken into account in the model. This means that rigid flocking laws can not react to the change of environments. In this paper, we make an attempt to design flocking systems that are adaptive to the change of communication environments. The flocking system is modeled as a cyber-physical system, where the cyber layer and control layer are designed systematically. In the cyber layer, a new interaction model is proposed by considering communication parameters of the environment. In the control layer, distributed controllers are designed for mobile agents with switching topology using the proposed interaction model. It is shown that the proposed flocking law can react to change of communication environments and guarantee the optimal communication link between agents. The stability and convergence of the flocking system are analyzed with nonsmooth techniques. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the design.