Spatial Consensus-Prevention in Robotic Swarms

In this work, we define the consensus-prevention problem, which examines the canonical swarm robotic consensus problem from an adversarial point of view: how (if at all) is it possible to lead a swarm into a disagreement, that is, prevent them from reaching an agreement. We focus on consensus-prevention in physically grounded tasks, concentrating on influencing the direction of movement of a flocking swarm and guaranteeing that the swarm will never converge to the same direction by the use of external, predefined agents, referred to as diverting agents.