Critical transition for colliding swarms

Swarming patterns that emerge from the interaction of many mobile agents are a subject of great interest in fields ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In some application areas, multiple swarms effectively interact and collide, producing complex spatiotemporal patterns. Recent studies have begun to address swarm-on-swarm dynamics, and in particular the scattering of two large, colliding swarms with nonlinear interactions. To build on early numerical insights, we develop a self-propelled, rigid-body approximation that can be used to predict the parameters under which colliding swarms are expected to form a milling state. Our analytical method relies on the assumption that, upon collision, two swarms oscillate near a limit cycle, where each swarm rotates around the other while maintaining an approximately constant and uniform density. Using this approach we are able to predict the critical swarm-on-swarm interaction coupling, below which two colliding swarms merely scatter, as a function of physical swarm parameters. We show that the critical coupling gives a lower bound for all impact parameters, including head-on collision, and corresponds to a saddle-node bifurcation of a stable limit cycle in the uniform, constant density approximation. Our results are tested and found to agree with both small and large multiagent simulations.