Flocking dynamics of agents moving with a constant speed and a randomly switching topology

Abstract

In this paper, we present a sufficient framework to exhibit the sample path-wise asymptotic flocking dynamics of the Cucker–Smale model with unit-speed constraint and the randomly switching network topology. We employ a matrix formulation of the given equation, which allows us to evaluate the diameter of velocities with respect to the adjacency matrix of the network. Unlike the previous result on the randomly switching Cucker–Smale model, the unit-speed constraint disallows the system to be considered as a nonautonomous linear ordinary differential equation on velocity vector, which forces us to get a weaker form of the flocking estimate than the result for the original Cucker–Smale model.

Keywords

• asymptotic flocking
• Cucker–Smale
• directed graph
• multi-agent system
• randomly switching topology
• unit-speed constraint
• 34A34
• 34D05
• 34F05