Multi-Robot Herding

GENERAL AND FLEXIBLE CONTROL SOLUTIONS FOR HERDING PROBLEMS

The herding problem consists in driving a group of targets to specific locations by coordinating a team of robots. Particularly of interest is the design of control strategies which outcome complex nonlinear systems, with targets described by noncooperative reactive behaviours.

Besides, many applications demand the herding of numerous and/or heterogeneous entities, making the development of flexible control solutions challenging. In this context, we propose [1,2] a control approach that finds suitable herding actions, even when the nonlinearities in the preys' dynamics yield to implicit equations. We resort to numerical analysis theory to develop a general and flexible solution with stability. We have also worked in the use of numerical methods in this context. The same idea is exploited to develop an adaptation law [1] that copes with uncertainties in the herd's models with stability guarantees. Moreover, our solution is completed with a novel caging technique based on uncertainty models and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) together with a distributed estimator to achieve a distributed solution.

We have studied this problem from the very base, analysing in first instance the linearised version of the general herding problem [3] to understand the limitations of the technique.  Besides, we have extended the theory to cases only a few herders can steer herd of hundreds of entities [4], approaching realistic scenarios.

Check the following repo for more info!: https://github.com/EduardoSebastianRodriguez/Multi-Robot-Implicit-Control-Herd

References

[1] E. Sebastián, E. Montijano and C. Sagüés, "Adaptive Multi-robot Implicit Control of Heterogeneous Herds", IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2022. Available online at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9823396 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05888

[2] E. Sebastián and E. Montijano, “Multi-robot implicit control of herds,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2021. Available online at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10895 

[3] E. Sebastián and E. Montijano, “A multi-robot cooperative control strategy for non-linear entrapment problems", 24th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, 2019 

[4] E. Sebastián, E. Montijano and C. Sagüés, "Multi-robot Implicit Control of Massive Herds", 5th Iberian Robotics Conference, 2022. Available online at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09705