TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2021//
TI  - Moving efficiently through a crowd: a nature-inspired traffic rule
JO  - Physical review. E
A1  - Danny Raj, M.
A1  - Kumaran, V.
SP  - e054609
EP  - e054609
VL  - 104
IS  - 5-1
N2  - In this article, we propose a traffic rule inspired from nature that instructs how a crowd made up of inert agents should respond to an elite agent to facilitate its motion through the crowd. When an object swims in a fluid medium or an intruder is forced through granular matter, characteristic flow fields are created around them. We show that if inert agents made small movements based on a traffic rule derived from these characteristic flow fields, then they efficiently reorganize and transport enough space for the elite to pass through. The traffic rule used in the article is a dipole field which satisfactorily captures the features of the flow fields around a moving intruder. We study the effectiveness of this dipole traffic rule using numerical simulations in a two-dimensional periodic domain, where one self-propelled elite agent tries to move through a crowd of inert agents that prefer to stay in a state of rest. Simulations are carried out for a wide range of strengths of the traffic rule and packing densities of the crowd. We characterize and analyze four regions in the parameter space-free-flow, motion due to cooperation and frozen and collective drift regions-and discuss the consequence of the traffic rule in light of the collective behavior observed. We believe that the proposed method can be of use in a swarm of robots working in constrained environments.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 2470-0045
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.104.054609
ID  - ref1
ER  -