Digital pheromone mechanisms for coordination of unmanned vehicles

Many social insects coordinate without direct communication or complex reasoning. They deposit and sense chemicals ("pheromones") in a shared physical environment that participates actively in the system's dynamics, yielding robust adaptive coordination. Seeking such characteristics in engineered systems, we have developed a software environment that uses digital pheromones to coordinate computational agents. We apply digital pheromones to the control of air combat missions [8], developing several promising mechanisms for general agent coordination. This report describes pheromone-based movement control as a variety of potential-field-based methods, reviews the mechanisms we have developed, and describes their performance in several air combat scenarios.