A Physically Grounded Approach to Coordinate Movements in a Team

Focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of a cooperative team in an environment, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. The idea is to have the movements of team members driven by abstract force fields, generated by team members themselves and propagated via some embedded infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in team members' movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of team members following the shape of the fields and of dynamic fields re-shaping. A case study in the area of warehouse management is introduced to exemplify the proposed approach.