A Cooperative Hunting Behavior by Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Troops

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid control system consisting of a distributed time-varying feedback control law and a behavior-based control framework to coordinate motions of multiple non-holonomic mobile robots with two wheels driven independently on capturing/enclosing a target by making troop formations. This motion coordination is a cooperative behavior for security against invaders in surveillance areas. Each robot in this control law has its own coordinate system and it senses a target/invader, other robots and obstacles, in order to achieve this cooperative behavior without making any collision between them. Each robot especially has a two-dimensional control input referred to as a "formation vector" and the formation is controllable by the vectors. As for determining the formation vectors, we use a behavior-based control framework in which the robot has some reactions heuristically designed according to this cooperative hunting behavior. The validity of this hybrid system is supported by computer simulations.