Collaborative Hunting Strategy for Multi-Amphibious Spherical Robots in Obstacle Environments

Aiming at the problem of capturing dynamic targets in obstacle environment, this paper proposes the multi-robot collaborative hunting strategy based on artificial potential field, which can herd targets to a designated volume of space with a smaller number of robots required and lower computational cost. The strategy is composed of trajectory prediction of dynamic targets, resultant force generation mechanism based on artificial potential field, and cooperative path planning based on dynamic targets. In the proposed strategy, some obstacles in ideal positions can also be selected as defenders to form the hunting circle, which can reduce the number of robots required to complete the hunting task. In addition, robots near the target will actively drive the target to other robots to reduce the hunting time. The simulation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed multi-robot collaborative hunting strategy.