INFORMATION THEORETIC SELF-ORGANIZATION OF MULTIPLE AGENTS By RAJVIGNESH THOGULUA CHANDRASEKAR A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science INFORMATION THEORETIC SELF-ORGANIZATION OF MULTIPLE AGENTS By Rajvignesh Thogulua Chandrasekar August 2003 Chair: Jose C. Principe Major Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering This study intends to use the information theoretic interaction principle for selforganization of multiple agents. The impetus of this work comes from the recent increase in the application of swarm intelligence to versatile fields like defense, space and communication networks. One of the important problems in this exciting area is the coordination and control of individual agents in the swarm to produce desired collective behavior. Most of the available solutions for this problem are either heuristic or based on centralized approaches. Centralized approaches, often referred to as the leader–follower strategy, may not be applicable in many real-life situations. It may also lead to frailty in the overall system and increased costs. In this work, a decentralized approach to solve this problem using an information theoretic interaction between the agents is suggested. This technique uses entropy maximization to spread the agents uniformly over a particular region of interest and also to guide the collective towards a target. By minimizing the communication between the