Swarms of autonomous agents are useful in many applications due to their ability to accomplish tasks in a decentralized manner, making them more robust to failures. Due to the difficulty in running experiments with large numbers of hardware agents, researchers often make simplifying assumptions and remove constraints that might be present in a real swarm deployment. While simplifying away some constraints is tolerable, we feel that two in particular have been overlooked: one, that agents in a swarm take up physical space, and two, that agents might be damaged in collisions. Many existing works assume agents have negligible size or pass through each other with no added penalty. It seems possible to ignore these constraints using collision avoidance, but we show using an illustrative example that this is easier said than done. In particular, we show that collision avoidance can interfere with the intended swarming behavior and significant parameter tuning is necessary to ensure the behavior emerges as best as possible while collisions are avoided. We compare four different collision avoidance algorithms, two of which we consider to be the best decentralized collision avoidance algorithms available. Despite putting significant effort into tuning each algorithm to perform at its best, we believe our results show that further research is necessary to develop swarming behaviors that can achieve their goal while avoiding collisions with agents of non-negligible volume.

自治代理群在许多应用程序中很有用，因为它们具有以分散方式完成任务的能力，从而使它们对故障更加健壮。由于使用大量硬件代理进行实验很困难，因此研究人员经常简化假设并消除实际部署中可能存在的约束。尽管简化一些约束是可以容忍的，但我们认为，尤其是有两个被忽略了：一个是群体中的代理占据了物理空间，第二个是代理在碰撞中可能会损坏。许多现有作品都假定代理人的规模可以忽略不计，或者彼此通过而没有增加任何惩罚。使用冲突避免似乎可以忽略这些约束，但是我们通过一个说明性示例说明，这说起来容易做起来难。特别是，我们表明，避免冲突可能会干扰预期的蜂群行为，并且必须进行重要的参数调整以确保在避免冲突的情况下尽可能最佳地出现该行为。我们比较了四种不同的碰撞避免算法，我们认为其中两种是可用的最佳分散式碰撞避免算法。尽管我们投入了大量精力来优化每种算法以使其达到最佳性能，但我们相信我们的结果表明，有必要进行进一步的研究来开发可实现其目标，同时避免与不可忽略体积的代理发生冲突的蜂拥行为。我们比较了四种不同的碰撞避免算法，我们认为其中两种是可用的最佳分散式碰撞避免算法。尽管我们投入了大量精力来优化每种算法以使其达到最佳性能，但我们相信我们的结果表明，有必要进行进一步的研究来开发可实现其目标，同时避免与不可忽略体积的代理发生冲突的蜂拥行为。我们比较了四种不同的碰撞避免算法，我们认为其中两种是可用的最佳分散式碰撞避免算法。尽管我们投入了大量精力来优化每种算法以使其达到最佳性能，但我们相信我们的结果表明，有必要进行进一步的研究来开发可实现其目标，同时避免与不可忽略体积的代理发生冲突的蜂拥行为。