Patterns of Flocking in Autonomous Agents

Flocking models have gained much popularity in many diverse fields such as swarm robotics, nano-technologies, study of dispersion of cancerous cells, study of traffic streams and animations. All of which is derived from beautiful phenomena of nature observed in social animals like birds, bees, or fish where each individual-level interaction amongst themselves bring about a collective behavior motion as a group. This vast range of evolving research areas has made the study of flocking behavior essential. In this paper, we investigate how social behavior factors such as mutual attraction, mutual repulsion and sense of orientation in individuals, referred as agents, can affect the patterns in flocking movements. Interesting flocking patterns such as directional convergence, positional convergence, symmetrical concentric patterns and stagnant oscillating clusters have emerged from creating minor changes in social behaviors of individuals that may be useful to engineers, biologist and sociologists as presented in this paper.