The Entrapment/Escorting Mission for a Multi-Robot System: Theory and Experiments

In this paper the problem of entrapping/escorting an autonomous target with a multi-robot system is presented. The proposed solution is based on the null-space-based behavioral control approach, that, by a suitable decomposition of the mission into elementary tasks, geometrically describes the concept of catching a target. The experimental results with the use of a platoon of 6 Khepera II mobile robots show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, an intentional failure of one of the robots is introduced in order to test the robustness and the dynamic scalability property of the proposed technique.