Orienting a flock via ad hoc teamwork

Ad hoc teamwork refers to the challenge of designing agents that can influence the behavior of a team, without prior coordination with its teammates. This abstract summarizes a portion of our work on influencing a flock of agents to adopt a desired behavior within the context of ad hoc teamwork. We shortly summarize our work on examining how the ad hoc agents should behave in order to orient a flock towards a target heading as quickly as possible when given knowledge of, but no direct control over, the behavior of the flock. We overview three algorithms which the ad hoc agents can use to influence the flock, and summarize some of our initial results concerning the relative importance of coordinating the ad hoc agents versus planning farther ahead.