Communication-free shepherding navigation with multiple steering agents

Abstract

Flocking guidance addresses a challenging problem considering the navigation and control of a group of passive agents. To solve this problem, shepherding offers a bio-inspired technique for navigating such a group of agents using external steering agents with appropriately designed movement law. Although most shepherding research is mainly based on the availability of centralized instructions, these assumptions are not realistic enough to solve some emerging application problems. Therefore, this paper presents a decentralized shepherding method where each steering agent makes movements based on its own observation without any inter-agent communication. Our numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by showing its high success rate and low costs in various placement patterns. These advantages particularly improve with the increase in the number of steering agents. We also confirm the robustness and resilience properties of the proposed method via numerical simulations.