UC San Diego

The swarming, flocking, and schooling behaviors of animals, in which agents tend to align orientations, have provided myriad insights into the physics of collective systems. In this thesis, we study the dynamics of a different collective system, inspired by Braitenberg’s “aggression” vehicles. Individuals move with constant velocity and align their orientation towards the position of their neighbors. This simple rule of motion leads to collective chase dynamics that are markedly different from flocking. We first analyze chaser pairs and demonstrate several emergent states including straight-line and circular chasing. Using two mobile robots with light-dependent feedback control we validated these observations in experiment. In simulations with larger groups, we study the role of sensory input by restricting the visual range of the individuals (vision-cone angle) and observe vision-dependent emergent behaviors such as the number of chasing clusters and the average agent-agent distance in each cluster. Lastly, we demonstrate how chasers can converge to close proximity clusters through imposed oscillatory motion. This method shows a concise way for compact swarm aggregation without complex communication and precise distance measurement requirements which are commonly used in previous research.