Large-scale multi-agent systems, or swarms, are collections of many simple mobile agents whose local interactions produce macroscopic spatial behaviours such as lattice patterns, coverage, and regulated density. This area covers how to model such systems (agent-based and continuum/density descriptions), how to design distributed control laws that steer the collective toward a desired spatial configuration, and how to prove stability of the resulting behaviour with graph-theoretic and Lyapunov tools. It spans both engineered swarms (robotics) and biological collectives (microorganisms responding to stimuli). Students learn to connect microscopic interaction rules to emergent macroscopic patterns and to reason about when a distributed strategy provably converges.
This PhD thesis develops methods for modelling, analysing, and controlling the spatial behaviours of large-scale multi-agent systems (LS-MAS, or swarms) of mobile agents, with applications to swarm r…