Push and Pull: Shepherding Multi-Agent Robot Teams in Adversarial Situations

Abstract

Teams of robots tasked with making critical decisions in competitive environments are at risk for being shepherded or misdirected to a location that is advantageous for a competing team. Our lab is working to understand how adversarial teams of robots can successfully move their competition to desired locations in part so that we can then devise practices to counter these strategies and help make team functioning more successful and secure. In this paper, preliminary research is presented that studies how a team of robots can be shepherded or misdirected to a disadvantageous location. We draw inspiration from herding practices as well as deceptive practices seen in higher-order primates and humans. We define behaviors for the target (mark) agents to be moved as well as members of the shepherding team (a pushing agent and pulling shills) and present simulation results showing how these behaviors move robots to a desired location. These behaviors were implemented and trialed on hardware platform. A discussion of ongoing research into understanding misdirection in multi-robot teams concludes this paper.