2017/05/31 by Illés J. Farkas, Illes J. Farkas, Shuohong Wang +1 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Artificial intelligence #Classical mechanics #Collective behavior #Collective motion #Computer science #Control (management) #Control theory (sociology) #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #Flocking (texture) #Geometry #Isotropy #Mathematics #Micro and Nano Robotics #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Noise (video) #Optics #Parameter space #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Range (aeronautics) #Statistical physics #Uncorrelated #cond-mat.other #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0191745
published in PLoS ONE 13(5), e0191745 (Public Library of Science) · 12 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2017/11/30 · openalex publication_date 2018/05/04 · arxiv updated 2018/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Fish, birds, insects and robots frequently swim or fly in groups.During their three dimensional collective motion, these agents do not stop, they avoid collisions by strong shortrange repulsion, and achieve group cohesion by weak long-range attraction.In a minimal model that is isotropic, and continuous in both space and time, we demonstrate that (i) adjusting speed to a preferred value, combined with (ii) radial repulsion and an (iii) effective long-range attraction are sufficient for the stable ordering of autonomously moving agents in space.Our results imply that beyond these three rules ordering in space requires no further rules, for example, explicit velocity alignment, anisotropy of the interactions or the frequent reversal of the direction of motion, friction, elastic interactions, sticky surfaces, a viscous medium, or vertical separation that prefers interactions within horizontal layers.Noise and delays are inherent to the communication and decisions of all moving agents.Thus, next we investigate their effects on ordering in the model.First, we find that the amount of noise necessary for preventing the ordering of agents is not sufficient for destroying order.In other words, for realistic noise amplitudes the transition between order and disorder is rapid.Second, we demonstrate that ordering is more sensitive to displacements caused by delayed interactions than to uncorrelated noise (random errors).Third, we find that with changing interaction delays the ordered state disappears at roughly the same rate, whereas it emerges with different rates.In summary, we find that the model discussed here is simple enough to allow a fair understanding of the modeled phenomena, yet sufficiently detailed for the description and management of large flocks with noisy and delayed interactions.Our code is available at http://github.com/fij/floc. Introduction: Collective motion in 2 and 3 dimensionsIn all fields of life recent technological developments have lead to a surge in data acquisition.However, usually the obtained data can be put to practical use only with improved analytic and predictive methods.For collective motion (swarming, active matter), some of the recent major experimental advances have been the systematic measurements of fish trajectories in