Liwei Xuan

Effective collective motion hinges on the seamless transfer of local information, yet vision-based mechanisms, while potent for generating rapid consensus, are inherently fragile. Visual links can be severed instantly by occlusions, leading to a phenomenon characterized as “sensory amnesia.” Seeking to fortify this vulnerability, Pheromone-Modulated Body Orientation Change (PM-BOC) is introduced as a dual-channel framework that fuses transient visual cues with a persistent environmental memory. Rather than treating these inputs in isolation, motion salience is quantified via BOC and mapped onto a decaying virtual pheromone field, dynamically modulating interaction weights by coupling instantaneous visual projections with local pheromone concentrations. This strategy effectively constructs a temporal buffer, bridging the informational voids left by blind spots. Validation, spanning from systematic physics simulations to high-fidelity simulations with a swarm of 50 UUVs, reveals that PM-BOC sustains superior cohesion in obstacle-laden environments where baseline visual models falter. Notably, this coupling suppresses high-frequency sensory noise while inducing resilient, scale-free velocity correlations that scale linearly with system size. By reconciling the trade-off between the immediacy of visual responsiveness and the robustness of environmental memory, this study offers a scalable paradigm for engineering resilient swarm systems capable of navigating the uncertainties of perception-limited environments.

Swarm coverage by unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is essential for inspection, environmental monitoring, and search operations, but remains challenging in three-dimensional domains under limited sensing and communication. Pheromone-based stigmergic coordination provides a low-bandwidth alternative to explicit communication, yet conventional single-field models are susceptible to depth-dependent sensing inconsistencies and multi-source signal interference. This paper introduces a dual-trail stigmergic coordination framework in which a virtual pheromone field encodes short-term motion cues while an auxiliary coverage trail records the accumulated exploration effort. UUV motion is guided by the combined gradients of these two fields, enabling more consistent behavior across depth layers and mitigating ambiguities caused by overlapping pheromone sources. At the macroscopic level, swarm evolution is modeled by a coupled system of partial differential equations (PDEs) describing vehicle density, pheromone concentration, and coverage trail. A Lyapunov functional is constructed to derive sufficient conditions under which perturbations around the uniform coverage equilibrium decay exponentially. Numerical simulations in three-dimensional underwater domains demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces coverage holes, limits redundant overlap, and improves robustness with respect to a single-pheromone baseline and a potential-field-based controller. These results indicate that dual-field stigmergic control is a promising and scalable approach for UUV coverage in constrained underwater environments.