Formations of Agents Interacting by the Thermal Motion Equivalent Method

Multi-agent systems have advantages over single vehicles when performing scalable tasks, such as area monitoring. For area monitoring it is reasonable to use a heterogeneous multi-agent system, where part of the agents has on board optical sensors to search for objects, and the remaining agents have a device for interaction with the found objects, for example, a capture device. In this case, it is useful to provide monitoring by formations of agents, such as pairs of agents with optical sensors and capture devices to enable the multi-agent system to respond to found objects as quickly as possible. A swarm control method, named the thermal motion equivalent method, was previously proposed to solve the problem of searching for objects in an unknown environment. This method induces agents to Brownian chaotic motion in a given area. In this paper, a method of coupling and synchronization of agent motion is proposed to solve the formation problem. The quality of the method is evaluated by numerical simulation of a nonlinear model of the agent. Numerical simulation results are also presented, considering the data transmission delays in the agent network. The simulation results show the stability of the multi-agent system and formation of several agents.