A cooperative hunting behavior by multiple nonholonomic mobile robots

Abstract

This paper presents a smooth time-varying feedback control law for coordinating motions of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots of the Hilare-type to capture/enclose a target by forming 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, to achieve this cooperative behavior without making any collision. Each robot especially has a vector called "a formation vector" and formations are controllable by the vectors. As for determining the formation vectors, we use a reactive control framework in which robots have reactions heuristically designed according to this cooperative behavior. Therefore, this robotic system is a hybrid system that consists of a smooth time-varying feedback control law and a reactive control framework. The validity of this hybrid system is supported by computer simulations.