Physics and Visualization in Swarm Agent Modeling

When designing an agent model for a multi-agent swarm, many decisions must be made regarding which aspects of the agent should be included in the simulated agent's specification. This thesis investigates the role of physics and visualization in agent modeling. Particularly, this work demonstrates that when modeling an agent which represents a physically embodied entity, the physical description of the agent may be vital to the accuracy of the simulation results. Extensions are made to the SimWorld environment, a simulator for multi-agent swarm experimentation, to provide rigid-body physics and three-dimensional renderings of simulations. The extended simulator is used to highlight the impact of physics and visualization in several swarm scenarios.