Harnessing control and performance analysis for sheepdog system: approach from spatial discretization

In this paper, we investigate gathering control of autonomous multiple agents by single mobile robot. This work was motivated by so-called sheepdog harnessing, in which a mobile robot is developed to gather a flock of ducks or sheep and maneuver them to a specified goal position. Based on discrete model of sheepdog system, we apply two different types of control methods to the system. After defining some evaluation indices (harness time, dispersion of flock), we analyze relationship among the parameters of the robot, the sheep and the control algorithms (center-targeting control, tangent-targeting control) by numerical simulations. Moreover, we propose an improved control method to maneuver separate groups of sheep to a goal position based on on-line clustering.