Co-Fields: A Physically Inspired Approach to Motion Coordination

This work focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of autonomous agents in a distributed environment. The term agent can refer not only to software components but also to any autonomous real-world entity with computing and networking capability, such as a PDA, a robot, or a modern car. The goals of these coordinated movements can include letting the agents meet somewhere, distribute themselves according to specific spatial patterns, or simply move in the environment without interfering with each other. To achieve this goal, we take inspiration from the physical world-that is, from the way particles in the universe move and globally self-organize according to the contextual information represented by fields.