Soft Control on Collective Behavior of a Group of Autonomous Agents by a Shill Agent

This paper asks a new question: how can we control the collective behavior of self-organized multi-agent systems? We try to answer the question by proposing a new notion called `Soft Control', which keeps the local rule of the existing agents in the system. We show the feasibility of soft control by a case study. Consider the simple but typical distributed multi-agent model proposed by Vicsek et al. for flocking of birds: each agent moves with the same speed but with different headings which are updated using a local rule based on the average of its own heading and the headings of its neighbors. Most studies of this model are about the self-organized collective behavior, such as synchronization of headings. We want to intervene in the collective behavior (headings) of the group by soft control. A specified method is to add a special agent, called a `Shill', which can be controlled by us but is treated as an ordinary agent by other agents. We construct a control law for the sh...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Jing Han, Ming Li, Lei Guo
• Keywords: Collective Behavior, CORR 2010, Education, Local Rule, Soft Control