Steering herds away from dangers in dynamic environments

Shepherding, the task of guiding a herd of autonomous individuals in a desired direction, is an essential skill to herd animals, enable crowd control, and rescue from danger. Equipping robots with the capability of shepherding would allow performing such tasks with increased efficiency and reduced labor costs. So far, only single-robot or centralized multi-robot solutions have been proposed. The former is unable to observe dangers at any place surrounding the herd, and the latter does not generalize to unconstrained environments. Therefore, we propose a decentralized control algorithm for multi-robot shepherding, where the robots maintain a caging pattern around the herd to detect potential nearby dangers. When danger is detected, part of the robot swarm positions itself in order to repel the herd towards a safer region. We study the performance of our algorithm for different collective motion models of the herd. We task the robots to shepherd a herd to safety in two dynamic scenarios: ..., This dataset has been collected by simulations running python scripts.
The figures shown in the paper contain simulation results from 30 stochastically independent runs.
See README.md for the full details on how to reproduce the data from the code., Data files (.npy and/or .pkl extensions) have to be opened using Python.
Install to open files
Language: Python3.9Packages: requirements.txt
# Ubuntu commandssudo apt-get -y updatesudo apt-get -y install software-properties-commonsudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt-get -y install python3.9 python3.9-dev
Install to re-run code
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
(See README.md)