Control of flocking behavior using informed agents: An experimental study

This work investigates the controlling effects of a small group of agents on a large flock. The flock consists of a small fraction of informed agents, who are aware of the final goal, and a large fraction of naïve agents, who are not aware of the final goal but tend to stay with the group. The interesting point of this work is that although the informed agents can not transmit information such as their moving direction or their headings, they, just as naïve agents, tend to stay with the group - but because of having the extra tendency (of goal attraction), they use any occasion to approach the goal. It is shown that the flocking target can be controlled using a small fraction of these informed agents. The evaluation experiments are executed on E-Puck miniature robots and the effect of some parameters, such as the fraction of informed agents, information about target, and randomness of movements, are investigated.