A physicochemically inspired approach to flocking control of multiagent system

Theoretical studies suggest that dispersion and repulsion are two important interactions that occur within non-polar particles. Enlightened by this, we propose a simple model for flocking of autonomous agents interacting by physicochemically inspired dispersion and repulsion interactions. This interdisciplinary effort provides a generic framework for design and analysis of distributed flocking by introducing virtual electrons (VEs). We innovatively utilize the functional theory to construct the energy functional with the distribution density of VEs as the basic variable and then solve the Lagrangian equation to derive the control law of multiagent flocking. Theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed protocol can ensure that autonomous agents asymptotically converge to an equilibrium configuration from chaotic movement and meanwhile all agents tend in time to a common velocity. Numerical simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of theoretical results. We also give a comparison with the collective potential method and found that the proposed approach can realize the rapid transition of autonomous agents from disordered to ordered movement. This implies that the proposed framework can effectively avoid the limitation of constructing a complicated empirical field and thus may have broad application prospects.