A cooperative hunting behavior by mobile robot troops

Presents a feedback control law for coordinating motions of multiple holonomic mobile robots 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. Although there is no centralized controller and each robot has local feedback that is relative position feedback, all the robots are asymptotically stabilized and they form formations enclosing a target. 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 feedback control law and a reactive control framework. The validity of this hybrid system is supported by computer simulations.