Abstract
Flocking is an emergent behavior in which each individual agent follows a simple behavior rule that leads to a group behavior that appears cohesive and coordinated. In our work, we consider how to influence a flock using a set of ad hoc agents. Ad hoc agents are added to the flock and are able to influence the flock to adopt a desired behavior by acting as part of the flock. Specifically, we first examine how the ad hoc agents can behave to quickly orient a flock towards a target heading when given knowledge of, but no direct control over, the behavior of the flock. Then we consider how the ad hoc agents can behave to herd the flock through turns quickly but with minimal agents being separated from the flock as a result of these turns. We introduce an algorithm which the ad hoc agents can use to influence the flock. We also present detailed experimental results for our algorithm, concluding that in this setting, short-term lookahead planning improves significantly upon baseline methods and can be used to herd a flock through turns quickly while maintaining the composition of the flock.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bowling, M., McCracken, P.: Coordination and adaptation in impromptu teams. In: AAAI, pp. 53–58 (2005)
Celikkanat, H., Sahin, E.: Steering self-organized robot flocks through externally guided individuals. Neural Computing & Applications 19(6), 849–865 (2010)
Couzin, I.D., Krause, J., Franks, N.R., Levin, S.A.: Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature 433(7025), 513–516 (2005)
Cucker, F., Huepe, C.: Flocking with informed agents. MathematicS in Action 1(1), 1–25 (2008)
Ferrante, E., Turgut, A.E., Mathews, N., Birattari, M., Dorigo, M.: Flocking in stationary and non-stationary environments: A novel communication strategy for heading alignment. In: Schaefer, R., Cotta, C., Kołodziej, J., Rudolph, G. (eds.) PPSN XI. LNCS, vol. 6239, pp. 331–340. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Genter, K., Agmon, N., Stone, P.: Ad hoc teamwork for leading a flock. In: AAMAS (May 2013)
Han, J., Li, M., Guo, L.: Soft control on collective behavior of a group of autonomous agents by a shill agent. Systems Science and Complexity 19, 54–62 (2006)
Jadbabaie, A., Lin, J., Morse, A.: Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 48(6), 988–1001 (2003)
Jones, E., Browning, B., Dias, M.B., Argall, B., Veloso, M.M., Stentz, A.T.: Dynamically formed heterogeneous robot teams performing tightly-coordinated tasks. In: ICRA, pp. 570–575 (2006)
Luke, S., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Panait, L., Sullivan, K., Balan, G.: Mason: A multi-agent simulation environment. Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International 81(7), 517–527 (2005)
Reynolds, C.W.: Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. SIGGRAPH 21, 25–34 (1987)
Stone, P., Kaminka, G.A., Kraus, S., Rosenschein, J.S.: Ad hoc autonomous agent teams: Collaboration without pre-coordination. In: AAAI (2010)
Su, H., Wang, X., Lin, Z.: Flocking of multi-agents with a virtual leader. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 54(2), 293–307 (2009)
Turgut, A., Celikkanat, H., Gokce, F., Sahin, E.: Self-organized flocking in mobile robot swarms. Swarm Intelligence 2(2-4), 97–120 (2008)
Vicsek, T., Czirok, A., Ben-Jacob, E., Cohen, I., Sochet, O.: Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles. Physical Review Letters 75(6) (1995)
Yu, C.H., Werfel, J., Nagpal, R.: Collective decision-making in multi-agent systems by implicit leadership. In: van der Hoek, W., Kaminka, G.A., Lespérance, Y., Luck, M., Sen, S. (eds.) AAMAS, pp. 1189–1196 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Genter, K., Stone, P. (2014). Influencing a Flock via Ad Hoc Teamwork. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8667. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09952-1_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09952-1_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09951-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09952-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)