A Distributed Multi-Robot Collaborative Hunting Method in Dynamic Cluttered Environments

The paper proposes a distributed multi-robot cooperative hunting method in cluttered environments with guaranteed collision avoidance. First, to achieve collision avoidance, a robot safety region collision avoidance method based on Buffered Voronoi Cells (BVC) is proposed. Then, under the BVC collision avoidance framework, a Kalman filer is designed to estimate the evader' position. Next, a hunting cost function based on the evader's position probability density function is constructed. Furthermore, the hunting controller for the pursuers is designed inspired by Voronoi coverage control. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that under the influence of this controller, the distance between the pursuers and the evader continuously decreases until the hunting is successful.