Limit Theorems and Optimal Policies for Flock Flight through Poisson Forests

Source abstract

Inspired by birds flying through cluttered environments, Karaman and Frazzoli showed that high-speed flight through an ergodic random forest exhibits an ultimate speed limit: above a critical speed, almost surely no infinite collision-free trajectory exists for a single bird. This paper formulates a corresponding bulk-transport problem for many birds. We construct an explicit directed corridor network in a Poisson disk forest and impose a common temporal headway at its waypoints. The maximum current equals a minimum vertex-cut capacity and is achieved by repeated flight along vertex-disjoint paths. The same schedule maximizes completed traversals at every finite horizon, with constant forward speed and no internal waiting. For a forest belt of fixed depth, exact transverse superadditivity yields an almost-sure deterministic current-density limit. A uniform shape theorem for an asymmetric planar dual identifies the current when depth and width grow together. For diverging depth bounded by a constant times width, this current equals the width-first, depth-second limit and is independent of the positive aspect ratio. When diagonal corridors are available, bulk current is positive at sufficiently low obstacle intensity and zero at sufficiently high intensity. For stochastic demand, an upstream admission queue is stable at every rate below the finite-network capacity.