Research on the Sheepdog Problem Using Cellular Automata

The purpose of this paper is to propose a simulation framework for complex path planning problems with multi-agent systems. The paper focuses on the "sheepdog problem" that handles distributed autonomous robot systems. This problem is an extension of the "pursuit problem" that handles one prey robot and multiple predator robots. The sheepdog problem challenges to handle more complex issue, that is, multiple dog robots try to chase and capture multiple sheep robots. In this paper, we propose the use of Boids model and cellular automata to model the flocking behavior for the sheep robots, and the chasing and capturing behavior for the dog robots. We demonstrate an experiment of the sheepdog problem.