Towards Self-Organizing Swarms Composed of Swarmalators with Distributed Couplings

Steven Ceron, Pascal Spino, Daniela Rus

Keywords: swarm robotics, coupled oscillators

TL;DR: Description of studies of swarming oscillators with distributed coupling that enable novel and diverse self-organized behaviors applicable to robot swarms.

Abstract: We introduce the swarming oscillator framework to robotics researchers and present exciting preliminary results related to distributed coupling. The full development of this study is a full research program that will consist of various phases across many papers and studies. One phase will enable us to refine distributed coupling swarming oscillator models so that we can achieve specific swarming behaviors. The next phase uses our distributed coupling models to design robot collective systems that realize the swarming behavior predicted through the swarming oscillator model. In the first phase, this work will demonstrate a major thrust for the swarming oscillator field and will have the potential to impact diverse fields ranging from swarm robotics, to mobile networking systems, to characterization of natural swarming phenomena.