Perc, Matjaz and Cheng, Zhao and Zhang, Hai-Tao and Chen, M.Z.Q. and Zhou, Tao and Valeyev, Najl V. (2011) Aggregation Pattern Transitions by Slightly Varying the Attractive/Repulsive Function. PLoS ONE, 6 (7). e22123. ISSN 1932-6203.
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| Official URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0022123 |
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Abstract
Among collective behaviors of biological swarms and flocks, the attractive/repulsive (A/R) functional links between particles play an important role. By slightly changing the cutoff distance of the A/R function, a drastic transition between two distinct aggregation patterns is observed. More precisely, a large cutoff distance yields a liquid-like aggregation pattern where the particle density decreases monotonously from the inside to the outwards within each aggregated cluster. Conversely, a small cutoff distance produces a crystal-like aggregation pattern where the distance between each pair of neighboring particles remains constant. Significantly, there is an obvious spinodal in the variance curve of the inter-particle distances along the increasing cutoff distances, implying a legible transition pattern between the liquid-like and crystal-like aggregations. This work bridges the aggregation phenomena of physical particles and swarming of organisms in nature upon revealing some common mechanism behind them by slightly varying their inter-individual attractive/repulsive functions, and may find its potential engineering applications, for example, in the formation design of multi-robot systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Subjects: | Q Science |
| Divisions: | Faculties > Science Technology and Medical Studies > School of Biosciences |
| Depositing User: | Sue Davies |
| Date Deposited: | 27 Mar 2012 15:39 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Apr 2012 09:40 |
| Resource URI: | http://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/29216 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes) |
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