Co-Fields : A Physically Inspired Approach to Distributed Motion Coordination

This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of mobile autonomous “agents” and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by locally perceived computational force fields (“Co-Fields”), generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some embedded infrastructure. A globally coordinated and adaptive behavior in the agent’s movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and the dynamic fields’ re-shaping.