Biologically inspired confinement of multi-robot systems. (1st January 2011)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Haque, Musad A.; Rahmani, Amir R.; Egerstedt, Magnus B.
• Is Part Of: International journal of bio-inspired computation. Volume 3:Number 4(2011)
• Page Start: 213
• Page End: 224
• Publication Date: 2011-01-01
• Subjects: biologically inspired design -- multi-agent coordination -- foraging robots -- perpetual confinement; Biologically-inspired computing -- Periodicals; Computational biology -- Periodicals; 572.0285
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1758-0366

Abstract

Confinement of a group of mobile robots is of significant interest to the multi-agent robotics community. We develop confinement strategies through simple biological models; in particular, we draw inspiration from the foraging techniques used by bottlenose dolphins to catch fish. For a multi-agent system, we achieve the following goals: 1 provide an algorithm for one group of agents to perpetually confine the other group 2 characterise the regions from which the herded agents are guaranteed to be captured. The simplicity of the model allows easy implementation in engineered devices (e.g., exploiting the collision avoidance modules already embedded in unmanned air and ground vehicles) and the richness of the model allows replication of a complex biological phenomenon, such as capturing of prey.