Ad hoc teamwork for leading a flock

Designing agents that can cooperate with other agents as a team, without prior coordination or explicit communication, is becoming more desirable as autonomous agents become more prevalent. In this paper we examine an aspect of the problem of leading teammates in an ad hoc teamwork setting, where the designed ad hoc agents lead the other teammates to a desired behavior that maximizes team utility. Specifically, we consider the problem of leading a flock of agents to a desired orientation using a subset of ad hoc agents. We examine the problem theoretically, and set bounds on the extent of influence the ad hoc agents can have on the team when the agents are stationary. We use these results to examine the complicated problem of orienting a stationary team to a desired orientation using a set of non-stationary ad hoc agents. We then provide an empirical evaluation of the suggested solution using our custom-designed simulator FlockSim.