A Swarm-Based Distributed Algorithm for Target Encirclement with Application to Monitoring Tasks in Precision Agriculture Scenarios
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Carolis, Giovanni de; Williams, Ryan; Gasparri, Andrea
- Source
- 2023 31st Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED) Control and Automation (MED), 2023 31st Mediterranean Conference on. :275-280 Jun, 2023
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Engineering Profession
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation
Three-dimensional displays
Network topology
Vegetation
Switches
Agriculture
Topology
Trajectory
- Language
- ISSN
- 2473-3504
This paper proposes a swarm-based approach for coordinating a multi-agent system (MAS) in a 3D environment to encircle a target for monitoring tasks in precision agriculture. Specifically, we are motivated by the objective of encircling large tree canopies in order to collaboratively gather information on tree health status. This goal is achieved by enhancing classical potential-based swarm design with a novel topology switching policy allowing the desired encirclement behavior to emerge. The resulting interaction protocol requires agents to utilize only local information, ensuring collision-free trajectories without restrictive assumptions on the undirected time-varying graph encoding the network topology. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.