Herd guidance by multiple sheepdog agents with repulsive force

This paper proposes a scalable method of guiding sheep herding with efficiency and robustness by single or multiple sheepdogs. Recently, much attention has been paid to control methods modeled on a sheep herd by a very small number of sheepdog agents. Usually, these control systems are connected to the Internet in some way, and the system must be capable of dealing with requirements such as robot failure or hacking by malicious entities. However, except for a few studies, multiple sheepdog agents to work together efficiently have been rarely discussed. The main problem is the way to produce an efficient geographical role assignment to multiple sheepdogs. Experimental results show that the introducing repulsion gain \(K_{f4}\) between a couple of two sheepdogs can emerge circle formation, while the group of sheepdogs guides a flock of sheep to goal. Therefore, it can achieve the task more quickly and reliably than the conventional method of a single sheepdog by increasing the number of units. This paper is based on the paper presented at the proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Tashiro et al., The 4th International Symposium on 528 Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics: 397–408, 2021).