Disturbances in Influence of a Shepherding Agent is More Impactful than Sensorial Noise During Swarm Guidance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different types of noise affect swarm guidance via shepherding, revealing that actuation disturbances have a greater impact than sensory inaccuracies, and emphasizing the importance of precise influence over sensory fidelity.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes the effects of sensory and actuation noise on shepherding algorithms, highlighting the greater sensitivity to actuation disturbances and the need for adaptive parameterization.

Findings

Actuation noise impacts shepherding performance more than sensory noise.

Reducing actuation noise is more critical than improving sensor accuracy.

Different noise levels require different shepherding parameter settings.

Abstract

The guidance of a large swarm is a challenging control problem. Shepherding offers one approach to guide a large swarm using a few shepherding agents (sheepdogs). While noise is an inherent characteristic in many real-world problems, the impact of noise on shepherding is not a well-studied problem. We study two forms of noise. First, we evaluate noise in the sensorial information received by the shepherd about the location of sheep. Second, we evaluate noise in the ability of the sheepdog to influence sheep due to disturbance forces occurring during actuation. We study both types of noise in this paper, and investigate the performance of Str\"{o}mbom's approach under these actuation and perception noises. To ensure that the parameterisation of the algorithm creates a stable performance, we need to run a large number of simulations, while increasing the number of random episodes until stability is achieved. We then systematically study the impact of sensorial and actuation noise on performance. Str\"{o}mbom's approach is found to be more sensitive to actuation noise than perception noise. This implies that it is more important for the shepherding agent to influence the sheep more accurately by reducing actuation noise than attempting to reduce noise in its sensors. Moreover, different levels of noise required different parameterisation for the shepherding agent, where the threshold needed by an agent to decide whether or not to collect astray sheep is different for different noise levels.