Firefly-Inspired Synchronization in Swarms of Mobile Agents

Recently, there has been growing interest in the synchronization of mobile pulse-coupled oscillators. We build on the work by Prignano et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 114101) and show that agents that interact exclusively with others in their cone of vision can exhibit different synchronization regimes. Depending on their speed, synchronization emerges as a slow process through spreading of the local coherence, as a fast process where global synchronization dominates, or it is inhibited for a range of intermediate speeds. In addition, we show that, not only the speed of the agents, but also their angle and range of interaction can tune the appearance of this intermediate regime.