Reciprocal and Non-Reciprocal Swarmalators with Programmable Locomotion and Formations for Robot Swarms

Natural and robotic swarms often exhibit non- reciprocal interactions; agents do not exhibit equal and opposite forces on each other. By studying the effects of reciprocal and non-reciprocal interactions we are better able to design emergent behaviors in robot collectives composed of agents that exert attractive and repulsive forces on each other. Moreover, by controlling agent-specific coupling forces on-demand, we can enable a collective to exhibit desired behaviors previously not possible. We use a general form of the swarming oscillator, swarmalator, model to study reciprocal and non-reciprocal interactions among agents that affect each other’s motions over long and short distances, we use non-reciprocal coupling to elicit collective locomotion toward or away from target sites, and we use the control barrier function method to optimize the non-reciprocal interactions for a desired spatial formation. This work addresses the interests of the active matter, swarm robotics, and control barrier functions communities and demon- strates various collective behaviors with strong potential to be realized in macro- and micro- length scale robot swarms.