Abstract
A novel technique has been developed for autonomous swarm-based unknown environment scouting. A control method known as swarm shepherding was employed, which replicates the behaviour seen when a sheepdog guides a herd of sheep to an objective location. The guidance of the swarm agents was implemented using low computation cost, force-based behaviours. The exploration task was augmented by introducing swarm member role assignments, including a role which imposes a localised covering area for agents which stray too far from the swarm global centre of mass. The agents then proceeded to follow a Hilbert space-filling curve (HSFC) path within their localised region. The simulation results demonstrated that the inclusion of the HSFC paths improved the efficiency of goal-based exploration of the environment, which became more prominent with an increase in the density of the number of goals in the environment.
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Long, N.K., Garratt, M., Sammut, K., Sgarioto, D., Abbass, H.A. (2021). Shepherding Autonomous Goal-Focused Swarms in Unknown Environments Using Hilbert Space-Filling Paths. In: Abbass, H.A., Hunjet, R.A. (eds) Shepherding UxVs for Human-Swarm Teaming. Unmanned System Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60898-9_2
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