Promoting collective motion of self-propelled agents by discarding short-range interactions

• We study the collective motion of self-propelled agents with the restricted view.
• The field of view of each agent is an annulus.
• Compared with the circular view, the annular view promotes the collective motion.

We study the collective motion of self-propelled agents with the restricted view. The field of view of each agent is an annulus bounded by the outer radius rr and inner radius αrαr, where αα ​is a tunable parameter. We find that there exists an optimal value of αα leading to the highest degree of direction consensus. This phenomenon indicates that there exists superfluous communication in the collective motion of self-propelled agents and short-range interactions hinder the direction consensus of the system. The value of optimal αα decreases as the absolute velocity increases, while it increases as the outer radius rr and the system size increase. For a fixed value of αα, direction consensus is enhanced when the absolute velocity is small, the outer radius or the system size is large.