Alignment as Biological Inspiration for Control of Multi Agent Systems

In this paper, we develop a framework for evolution of a multi agent systems (MAS) under local perception. The idea of this paper comes from natural biological swarms where agents adjust their behavior based on individual perception of the behavior of its neighbors. Most available engineered swarms rely on local communication where an individual agent needs exact state information of its adjacent agents to evolve. We consider agents of a MAS to be particles of a continuum (deformable Body) transforming under a homogenous mapping. Homogenous transformations have the property that two crossing straight lines in an initial configuration translate as two different crossing straight lines. We will consider this feature of homogenous mappings to show how certain desired objectives can be achieved by agents of a swarm by preserving alignment among nearby agents. We show that evolution of a MAS under this alignment strategy can be achieved where agents don’t need to know the exact positions of the adjacent agents nor do they need peer to peer communication.