Immunology-inspired swarm coordination with application to multiple combat UGV systems

Immune system has several interesting and desirable properties such as adaptability, robustness, flexibility, archival memory, and distributed cognition abilities. This paper presents a multi-agent scheme with swarm coordination functions inspired by immune system. It is shown that by using local communication, each agent is able to select its favorite strategy based on distributed sensing, which leads to successful swarm behavior, and performs well even under dynamically changing environment. Furthermore, in the proposed scheme a thymus-like global coordination mechanism called a critic here is introduced to prevent undesirable crowding, thus improving the overall swarming behavior as verified by numerical simulation on a collection of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs).