Design of Mobile Control for Multiple Agents Inspired by Sheepdog Shepherding and its Verification

Abstract

This paper constructs a control system in which one highly mobile agent navigates autonomous multiple agents escaping from the agent according to nonlinear interaction. This study is motivated by the sheepdog system: a flock of thousands of sheep are controlled by only a few sheepdogs. Inspired by the sheepdog system, we have proposed a control law of a sheepdog to solve the problem of one sheep converging on a circular trajectory around a goal by one sheepdog, which is called the mobile control. In this paper, we extend this controller to applicable to a flock of sheep by treating multiple sheep as “a disc with a certain flock radius”. This paper deals with the problem of navigating a flock of sheep to converge their centers of gravity on a circular trajectory around a goal position. For this problem, we propose a flock model of sheep and an extended mobile control designed by considering the suitable distance between a sheepdog and a center of the flock. Finally, we verified the validity of the proposed method through numerical simulation and robot demonstrations.