Development of a controller for swarm aggregation in human-swarm interactions

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to show the design of a decentralized controller based on a switching strategy for the aggregation of a swarm in the presence of a human-in-the-loop with minimum communication between agents in search scenarios where the target location is unknown. The proposed controller considers the local sensing of each agent and limited inter-agent communication to form stable aggregates around a desired target. A mathematical model of the swarm is presented in order to show a theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm. Simulation experiments are presented to show the stability and aggregation capabilities of the controller with and without a human operating an agent. Furthermore, we propose a safety function to limit the capacity for maneuver (CfM) in order to avoid collisions when interacting with humans. The proposed controller and saturation to the input state shows the capabilities of aggregation and model the effect of the presence of an operator in the system.