Finite-time flocking control of a swarm of cucker-smale agents with collision avoidance

This paper considers the application of finite-time control to a Cucker-Smale flocking model of autonomous agents with collision avoidance. A mathematical expression for the upper bound on the flocking time is derived. Previous results without considering collision avoidance showed that the flocking time decreases as the number of robots in the flock increases, which is counter-intuitive. We showed that, with collision avoidance, the flocking time indeed increases with the flock size. Our mathematical results are verified by computer simulation. Simulation results also show that certain control parameters and noise can be used to reduce the flocking time.