Control Laws For Defective Swarming Systems

Swarming systems have been considered in the last decades as a promising technique for increasing the robustness, the flexibility and the autonomy of mis-sions envisaging robotic agents. Many researches have been focused on the con-trol laws which enable an accurate mimicking of the natural swarms (or flocks, schools) of animals. Also stability proofs of the proposed control laws have been reported. Starting from this state of the art, this paper will focus on the behavior of these large groups of robotic agents when some reasonable limitations are ap-plied, i.e. a constraint in the sensors range and in the number of neighbor agents that can be sensed. These swarms, here called defective, are shown to be performant in the task of detecting and gathering around a target (even if it is moving and in presence of obstacles) once a proper sensing rule is designed, i.e. a strategy for selecting the neighbor agents that each agent must consider