A fellow-following-principle based group model and its application to fish school analysis

Group models based on simple rules are viewed as a bridge to clarifying animal group movements. The more similar a model to real-world observations, the closer it is to the essence of such movements. Inspired by the fish school, this study suggests a principle called fellow-following for group movements. More specifically, a simple-rules-based model was proposed and extended into a set of concrete rules, and two- and three-dimensional group models were established. The model results are intuitively similar to the fish school, and when the group size increases, the milling phase of both the model and fish school tends from unstable to stable. Further, we proposed a novel order parameter and a similarity measurement framework for group structures. The proposed model indicates the intuition similarity, consistency of dynamic characteristics, and static structure similarity with fish schools, which suggests that the principle of fellow-following may reveal the essence of fish school movements. Our work suggests a different approach for the self-organized formation of a swarm robotic system based on local information.