Thermodynamics-Inspired Macroscopic States of Bounded Swarms

Abstract

The collective behavior of swarms is extremely difficult to estimate or predict, even when the local agent rules are known and simple. The presented work seeks to leverage the similarities between fluids and swarm systems to generate a thermodynamics-inspired characterization of the collective behavior of robotic swarms. While prior works have borrowed tools from fluid dynamics to design swarming behaviors, they have usually avoided the task of generating a fluids-inspired macroscopic state (or macrostate) description of the swarm. This work will bridge the gap by seeking to answer the following question: is it possible to generate a small set of thermodynamics-inspired macroscopic properties that may later be used to quantify all possible collective behaviors of swarm systems? In this paper, we present three macroscopic properties analogous to pressure, temperature, and density of a gas to describe the behavior of a swarm that is governed by only attractive and repulsive agent interactions. These properties are made to satisfy an equation similar to the ideal gas law and also generalized to satisfy the virial equation of state for real gases. Finally, we investigate how swarm specifications such as density and average agent velocity affect the system macrostate.