Related papers: A Continuification-Based Control Solution for Larg…
The problem of guiding a flock of several autonomous agents using repulsion force exerted by a smaller number of agents is called the shepherding problem and has been attracting attention due to its potential engineering applications.…
Field theories for complex systems traditionally focus on collective behaviors emerging from simple, reciprocal pairwise interaction rules. However, many natural and artificial systems exhibit behaviors driven by microscopic decision-making…
We propose a Reinforcement Learning framework for sparse indirect control of large-scale multi-agent systems, where few controlled agents shape the collective behavior of many uncontrolled agents. The approach addresses this multi-scale…
The design of control systems for the spatial self-organization of mobile agents is an open challenge across several engineering domains, including swarm robotics and synthetic biology. Here, we propose a bio-inspired leader-follower…
Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated on…
Robotic shepherding is a bio-inspired approach to autonomously guiding a swarm of agents towards a desired location. The research area has earned increasing research interest recently due to the efficacy of controlling a large number of…
We address the problem of controlling the density of a large ensemble of follower agents by acting on a group of leader agents that interact with them. Using coupled partial integro-differential equations to describe leader and follower…
Designing systems for autonomous transport of groups of living agents has received a lot of attention in recent years due to a wealth of important potential applications. Biomimetic approaches are often sought, and a range of herding…
This paper presents a novel control strategy to herd a group of non-cooperative evaders by means of a team of robotic herders. In herding problems, the motion of the evaders is typically determined by strong nonlinear reactive dynamics,…
This paper presents a novel control strategy for multi-agent shepherding of non-cohesive targets in obstacle-rich environments. Unlike previous approaches that assume cohesive flocking behavior, our method handles targets that interact only…
Controlling large particle systems in collective dynamics by a few agents is a subject of high practical importance, e.g., in evacuation dynamics. In this paper we study an instantaneous control approach to steer an interacting particle…
Shepherding involves herding a swarm of agents (\emph{sheep}) by another a control agent (\emph{sheepdog}) towards a goal. Multiple approaches have been documented in the literature to model this behaviour. In this paper, we present a…
We apply genetic programming techniques to the `shepherding' problem, in which a group of one type of animal (sheep dogs) attempts to control the movements of a second group of animals (sheep) obeying flocking behavior. Our genetic…
We investigate how a shepherd should move to effectively herd a flock towards a target. Using an agent-based (ABM) and a coarse-grained (ODE) model for the flock, we pose and solve for the optimal strategy of a shepherd that must keep the…
In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning approach to designing a control policy for a "leader" agent that herds a swarm of "follower" agents, via repulsive interactions, as quickly as possible to a target probability distribution…
Recent advances in robotics have enabled the widespread deployment of autonomous robotic systems in complex operational environments, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and significant security problems. Traditional shepherding…
This paper solves the problem of herding countless evaders by means of a few robots. The objective is to steer all the evaders towards a desired tracking reference while avoiding escapes. The problem is very challenging due to the highly…
Achieving scalable coordination in large robotic swarms is often constrained by reliance on inter-agent communication, which introduces latency, bandwidth limitations, and vulnerability to failure. To address this gap, a decentralized…
In this paper, we consider the problem of protecting a high-value area from being breached by sheep agents by crafting motions for dog robots. We use control barrier functions to pose constraints on the dogs' velocities that induce…
Controlling large swarms of robotic agents has many challenges including, but not limited to, computational complexity due to the number of agents, uncertainty in the functionality of each agent in the swarm, and uncertainty in the swarm's…