Related papers: Shepherding Heterogeneous Flocks: Overview and Pro…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…
Combining different types of agents in uncrewed vehicle (UV) swarms has emerged as an approach to enhance mission resilience and operational capabilities across a wide range of applications. This study offers a systematic framework for…
Controlling large particle systems in collective dynamics by a few agents is a subject of high practical importance, e.g., in evacuation dynamics. In this paper we study an instantaneous control approach to steer an interacting particle…
Optimal control of large particle systems with collective dynamics by few agents is a subject of high practical importance (e.g. in evacuation dynamics), but still limited mathematical basis. In particular the transition from discrete…
Sheep are gregarious animals, and they often aggregate into dense, cohesive flocks, especially under stress. In this paper, we use image processing tools to analyze a publicly available aerial video showing a dense sheep flock moving under…
Multi-agent embodied tasks have recently been studied in complex indoor visual environments. Collaboration among multiple agents can improve work efficiency and has significant practical value. However, most of the existing research focuses…
A population of heterogenous agents compeeting through a minority rule is investigated. Agents which frequently loose are selected for evolution by changing their strategies. The stationary composition of the population resulting for this…
This work concentrates on different aspects of the \textit{consensus problem}, when applying it to a swarm of flocking agents. We examine the possible influence an external agent, referred to as {\em influencing agent} has on the flock. We…
The number of multi-robot systems deployed in field applications has increased dramatically over the years. Despite the recent advancement of navigation algorithms, autonomous robots often encounter challenging situations where the control…
Robots sometimes have to work together with a mixture of partially-aligned or conflicting goals. Flocking - coordinated motion through cohesion, alignment, and separation - traditionally assumes uniform desired inter-agent distances. Many…
Collective migration of cells and animals often relies on a specialised set of "leaders", whose role is to steer a population of naive followers towards some target. We formulate a continuous model to understand the dynamics and structure…
We initiate the study of the heterogeneous facility location problem with limited resources. We mainly focus on the fundamental case where a set of agents are positioned in the line segment [0,1] and have approval preferences over two…
Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…
Recent advances in robotics have enabled the widespread deployment of autonomous robotic systems in complex operational environments, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and significant security problems. Traditional shepherding…
The problem of controlling complex networks is of interest to disciplines ranging from biology to swarm robotics. However, controllability can be too strict a condition, failing to capture a range of desirable behaviors. Herdability, which…
We propose a decentralized reinforcement learning solution for multi-agent shepherding of non-cohesive targets using policy-gradient methods. Our architecture integrates target-selection with target-driving through Proximal Policy…
This paper solves the problem of herding countless evaders by means of a few robots. The objective is to steer all the evaders towards a desired tracking reference while avoiding escapes. The problem is very challenging due to the highly…
We investigate an evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game among self-driven agents, where collective motion of biological flocks is imitated through averaging directions of neighbors. Depending on the temptation to defect and the velocity at…
Many multiagent systems in the real world include multiple types of agents with different abilities and functionality. Such heterogeneous multiagent systems have significant practical advantages. However, they also come with challenges…
Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…