Exploring Consensus Robustness in Swarms with Disruptive Individuals

Achieving consensus in collective systems is essential for coordinated behaviour, yet the presence of strongly opinionated minorities can disrupt opinion dynamics. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of consensus-reaching among stubborn individuals and contrarians, and we explore the effects of their interplay on consensus dynamics. We propose a methodology using formal technique of statistical model checking to quantify robustness under perturbations of the amount of disruptive individuals in the group. Unlike existing works that focus on robustness of a single group of disruptive individuals, our approach allows to investigate the robustness landscape for combinations of different disruptive agents. To this end, our approach can be used to guide the design and control of swarm robotics systems with a focus on resilience to disruptive agents.