Global manoeuvring of confined active particle swarms via emergent threshold-based control

This study investigates the use of global control strategies to enhance the directed migration of swarms of interacting self-propelled particles confined in a channel. Uncontrolled dynamics naturally leads to wall accumulation, clogging, and band formation due to the interplay between self-organization, volume exclusion and confinement. This work explores whether a uniform global control, such as a magnetic field acting identically on all particles, can robustly enhance collective transport. Using a discrete Vicsek-like model, it is found that simple global alignment controls emerging from reinforcement learning, efficiently suppress unfavorable configurations and significantly increase the net particle flux along a prescribed channel direction. These results highlight that coarse, system-level observations are sufficient to achieve global manoeuvring by indirectly reshaping self-organized microscopic dynamics, even in regimes with strong fluctuations or partial ordering.