Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School
 of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
 Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

 INFORMATION THEORETIC SELF-ORGANIZATION OF MULTIPLE AGENTS

 By

 Rajvignesh Thogulua Chandrasekar

 August 2003

Chair: Jose C. Principe
Major Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering

 This study intends to use the information theoretic interaction principle for self-

organization of multiple agents. The impetus of this work comes from the recent increase

in the application of swarm intelligence to versatile fields like defense, space and

communication networks. One of the important problems in this exciting area is the

coordination and control of individual agents in the swarm to produce desired collective

behavior. Most of the available solutions for this problem are either heuristic or based on

centralized approaches. Centralized approaches, often referred to as the leader-follower

strategy, may not be applicable in many real-life situations. It may also lead to frailty in

the overall system and increased costs.

 In this work, a decentralized approach to solve this problem using an information

theoretic interaction between the agents is suggested. This technique uses entropy

maximization to spread the agents uniformly over a particular region of interest and also

to guide the collective towards a target. By minimizing the communication between the