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Autores principales: Liu, Lucy, Werfel, Justin, Toschi, Federico, Mahadevan, L.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08100
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author Liu, Lucy
Werfel, Justin
Toschi, Federico
Mahadevan, L.
author_facet Liu, Lucy
Werfel, Justin
Toschi, Federico
Mahadevan, L.
contents In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot swarms and designing infrastructure for dense populations. Here, we use simulations, theory, and experiments to study how adding stochasticity to agent motion can reduce traffic jams and help agents travel more quickly to prescribed goals. A computational approach reveals the collective behavior. Above a critical noise level, large jams do not persist. From this observation, we analytically approximate the swarm's goal attainment rate, which allows us to solve for the agent density and noise level that maximize the goals reached. Robotic experiments corroborate the behaviors observed in our simulated and theoretical results. Finally, we compare simple, local navigation approaches with a sophisticated but computationally costly central planner. A simple reactive scheme performs well up to moderate densities and is far more computationally efficient than a planner, motivating further research into robust, decentralized navigation methods for crowded environments. By integrating ideas from physics and engineering using simulations, theory, and experiments, our work identifies new directions for emergent traffic research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_08100
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise-enabled goal attainment in crowded collectives
Liu, Lucy
Werfel, Justin
Toschi, Federico
Mahadevan, L.
Robotics
Soft Condensed Matter
Multiagent Systems
In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot swarms and designing infrastructure for dense populations. Here, we use simulations, theory, and experiments to study how adding stochasticity to agent motion can reduce traffic jams and help agents travel more quickly to prescribed goals. A computational approach reveals the collective behavior. Above a critical noise level, large jams do not persist. From this observation, we analytically approximate the swarm's goal attainment rate, which allows us to solve for the agent density and noise level that maximize the goals reached. Robotic experiments corroborate the behaviors observed in our simulated and theoretical results. Finally, we compare simple, local navigation approaches with a sophisticated but computationally costly central planner. A simple reactive scheme performs well up to moderate densities and is far more computationally efficient than a planner, motivating further research into robust, decentralized navigation methods for crowded environments. By integrating ideas from physics and engineering using simulations, theory, and experiments, our work identifies new directions for emergent traffic research.
title Noise-enabled goal attainment in crowded collectives
topic Robotics
Soft Condensed Matter
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08100