Directional Bounded-Confidence Cucker-Smale Flocking

Abstract:This paper introduces a directional bounded-confidence extension of the Cucker--Smale (CS) flocking model that decomposes pairwise relative velocities into independent radial and tangential channels within the instantaneous line-of-sight frame. Gating these components via compactly supported kernels creates a time-varying, state-dependent, matrix-weighted interaction that strictly generalizes classical scalar CS alignment. We establish an exact energy-dissipation identity with conserved mean velocity and prove exponential velocity consensus under a sliding-window persistent excitation (PE) condition formulated directly on the disagreement subspace. Furthermore, we derive a CS bounded-diameter criterion separating metric decay from aggregate directional coercivity, along with a cluster convergence guarantee. Simulations validate the exact dissipation balance and demonstrate that directional gating successfully restores global alignment in scenarios where traditional isotropic tied-confidence laws remain polarized.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2611.02173 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2611.02173v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.02173 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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