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Understanding collective self-organization in active matter, such as bird flocks and fish schools, remains a grand challenge in physics. Interactions that induce alignment are essential for flocking; however, alignment alone is generally…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-01 Julian Giraldo-Barreto , Viktor Holubec

Coordinated collective motion in bird flocks and fish schools inspires algorithms for cohesive swarm robotics. This paper presents a position-based flocking model that achieves persistent velocity alignment without velocity sensing. By…

For decades, robotics researchers have pursued various tasks for multi-robot systems, from cooperative manipulation to search and rescue. These tasks are multi-robot extensions of classical robotic tasks and often optimized on dimensions…

In this letter, we present a distributed algorithm for flocking in complex environments that operates at constant altitude, without explicit communication, no a priori information about the environment, and by using only on-board sensing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Manuel Boldrer , Vit Kratky , Viktor Walter , Martin Saska

This paper addresses a synchronization problem that arises when a team of aerial robots (ARs) need to communicate while performing assigned tasks in a cooperative scenario. Each robot has a limited communication range and flies within a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 J. M. Díaz-Báñez , L. E. Caraballo , M. A. Lopez , S. Bereg , I. Maza , A. Ollero

In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to move a group of robots in a formation. We model the problem as a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. Our aim is to design a control policy for maintaining a desired formation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Abhay Rawat , Kamalakar Karlapalem

In environments where multiple robots must coordinate in a shared space, decentralized approaches allow for decoupled planning at the cost of global guarantees, while centralized approaches make the opposite trade-off. These solutions make…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Claire Liang , Wil Thomason , E. Andy Ricci , Soham Sankaran

When agents collaborate on a task, it is important that they have some shared mental model of the task routines -- the set of feasible plans towards achieving the goals. However, in reality, situations often arise that such a shared mental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Yuening Zhang , Brian C. Williams

A number of coordinated behaviors have been proposed for achieving specific tasks for multi-robot systems. However, since most applications require more than one such behavior, one needs to be able to compose together sequences of behaviors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Pietro Pierpaoli , Anqi Li , Mohit Srinivasan , Xiaoyi Cai , Samuel Coogan , Magnus Egerstedt

The flocking motion control is concerned with managing the possible conflicts between local and team objectives of multi-agent systems. The overall control process guides the agents while monitoring the flock-cohesiveness and localization.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-20 Shuzheng Qu , Mohammed Abouheaf , Wail Gueaieb , Davide Spinello

This paper presents a novel zone-based flocking control approach suitable for dynamic multi-agent systems (MAS). Inspired by Reynolds behavioral rules for $boids$, flocking behavioral rules with the zones of repulsion, conflict, attraction,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Hossein B. Jond

This work presents a novel, inference-based approach to the distributed and cooperative flocking control of aerial robot swarms. The proposed method stems from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) dynamics by limiting the latent set to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Malintha Fernando

In communication restricted environments, a multi-robot system can be deployed to either: i) maintain constant communication but potentially sacrifice operational efficiency due to proximity constraints or ii) allow disconnections to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Lauren Bramblett , Shijie Gao , Nicola Bezzo

As foundation models are increasingly deployed as interacting agents in multi-agent systems, their collective behavior raises new challenges for trustworthiness, transparency, and accountability. Traditional coordination mechanisms, such as…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Brendan Gho , Suman Muppavarapu , Afnan Shaik , Tyson Tsay , Atharva Mohan , James Begin , Kevin Zhu , Archana Vaidheeswaran , Vasu Sharma

We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…

This paper addresses the problem of collaboratively satisfying long-term spatial constraints in multi-agent systems. Each agent is subject to spatial constraints, expressed as inequalities, which may depend on the positions of other agents…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-23 Farhad Mehdifar , Mani H. Dhullipalla , Charalampos P. Bechlioulis , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Over the past few decades, the research community has been interested in the study of multi-agent systems and their emerging collective dynamics. These systems are all around us in nature, like bacterial colonies, fish schools, bird flocks,…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2023-12-12 Gourab Kumar Sar , Dibakar Ghosh

Consensus control of multiagent systems arises in various robotic applications such as rendezvous and formation control. For example, to compute the control inputs of individual agents, the difference in the positions in aligned coordinate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-22 Zhonggang Li , Changheng Li , Raj Thilak Rajan

There have been numerous studies on the problem of flocking control for multiagent systems whose simplified models are presented in terms of point-mass elements. Meanwhile, full dynamic models pose some challenging problems in addressing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-05-12 Thang Nguyen , Hung La , Vahid Azimi , Thanh-Trung Han

Robot swarms require cohesive collective behaviour to address diverse challenges, including shape formation and decision-making. Existing approaches often treat consensus in discrete and continuous decision spaces as distinct problems. We…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Aalok Patwardhan , Andrew J. Davison