Multi-Robot Shepherding: A CLF-CBF Approach

This paper presents a control scheme for multirobot shepherding of non-cooperative agents, using a framework based on control barrier function and control Lyapunov function. The proposed control design guarantees the feasibility of the CLF-CBF quadratic optimization problem, even when the number of non-cooperative agents significantly exceeds the number of robots. This scheme supports distributed implementation with distributed sensing, leveraging the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers. Unlike previous works, the presented method does not impose constraints on the maximum velocities or sensing ranges of non-cooperative agents. Simulation results demonstrate that the controller can successfully shepherd large numbers of non-cooperative agents even without aggregation behaviors using teams as small as two robots.