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Volume 11 Issue 7
Jul.  2024

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Article Navigation >  IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica  > 2024  >  11(7): 1643-1655
M. Zhou, Z. Wang, J. Wang, and  Z. Cao,  “Multi-robot collaborative hunting in cluttered environments with obstacle-avoiding Voronoi cells,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 11, no. 7, pp. 1643–1655, Jul. 2024. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.124041
Citation: M. Zhou, Z. Wang, J. Wang, and  Z. Cao,  “Multi-robot collaborative hunting in cluttered environments with obstacle-avoiding Voronoi cells,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 11, no. 7, pp. 1643–1655, Jul. 2024. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.124041
shu

Multi-Robot Collaborative Hunting in Cluttered Environments With Obstacle-Avoiding Voronoi Cells

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.124041
Funds:  This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62273007, 61973023) and Project of Cultivation for Young Top-motch Talents of Beijing Municipal Institutions (BPHR202203032)
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    Abstract

  • This work proposes an online collaborative hunting strategy for multi-robot systems based on obstacle-avoiding Voronoi cells in a complex dynamic environment. This involves firstly designing the construction method using a support vector machine (SVM) based on the definition of buffered Voronoi cells (BVCs). Based on the safe collision-free region of the robots, the boundary weights between the robots and the obstacles are dynamically updated such that the robots are tangent to the buffered Voronoi safety areas without intersecting with the obstacles. Then, the robots are controlled to move within their own buffered Voronoi safety area to achieve collision-avoidance with other robots and obstacles. The next step involves proposing a hunting method that optimizes collaboration between the pursuers and evaders. Some hunting points are generated and distributed evenly around a circle. Next, the pursuers are assigned to match the optimal points based on the Hungarian algorithm. Then, a hunting controller is designed to improve the containment capability and minimize containment time based on collision risk. Finally, simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed cooperative hunting method is more competitive in terms of time and travel distance.

     

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    Highlights

    • This work proposes a distributed cooperative hunting algorithm based on a buffered Voronoi cell (BVC) based on the real-time distance between the pursuers and other obstacles. It is suitable for terrain with irregular obstacles
    • The construction process of BVC based on a support vector machine (SVM) method is introduced in detail
    • To deal with the multi-robot hunting problem, an optimal matching solution between pursuers and hunting points is designed based on the Hungarian algorithm. The solutions can achieve minimizing the total distance traveled by all the pursuers during the containment process. The proposed strategy transforms the hunting problem into a point-tracking problem to simplify the problem of multi-robot cooperative hunting
    • To further reduce the hunting time and total distance traveled by all pursuers, a switched control strategy is presented based on the distance between the pursuers and obstacles. By taking collision risks into consideration, the proposed method can enhance the hunting capability and minimize the hunting time

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