Distributed swarm control for multi-robot systems inspired by shepherding behaviors

Swarming behaviors play an eminent role in both biological and engineering research, and show great potential applications in many emerging fields. Traditional swarming models still lack integrity, uniformity, and stability in swarm forming processes, resulting in fragmentation and void phenomena. Inspired by the shepherding behaviors observed in nature, we propose an integrated negotiation-control scheme for distributed swarm control of massive robots. The core idea of this scheme is that the robots at the boundary of the group herd the internal robots to form an equilibrium swarm. For this purpose, we introduce a concept of virtual group center towards which boundary robots herd internal robots. Then, a distributed negotiation mechanism is designed to allow each robot to negotiate the virtual group center only through local interactions with its neighbors. After that, we propose a shepherding-inspired swarm control law to drive a group of robots to form an integrated, uniform, and stable configuration from any initial states. Both numerical and flight simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of our proposed swarm control scheme.