Title: Biologically inspired confinement of multi-robot systems

Authors: Musad A. Haque, Amir R. Rahmani, Magnus B. Egerstedt

Addresses: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. ' School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. ' School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

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.

Keywords: biologically inspired design; multi-agent coordination; foraging robots; perpetual confinement; bio-inspired computation; multi-robot systems; multi-agent systems; agent-based systems; MAS; multiple robots; mobile robots; bottlenose dolphins; collision avoidance; unmanned vehicles; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2011.041145

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2011 Vol.3 No.4, pp.213 - 224

Received: 20 Aug 2010
Accepted: 05 Feb 2011

Published online: 12 Nov 2014 *

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