Modelling of a Group of Social Agents Monitored by UAVs

Robotics cooperation in service environments, i.e. environments shared with other non-robotic agents, is becoming more and more popular in industrial, agriculture, environmental monitoring and social applications. In this paper we propose a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that has to control the trajectories of a group of agents having an internal behavioural logic, such as a group of human beings moving in a shared environment or an animal flocking. The controlling UAVs are assumed to generate a force on the group members, modelled as a repulsive force and representing some sort of ``fear'' of the flying robot. To this end, this paper proposes both an effective model for the group of agents, which is inspired by the Social Force Model, and a distributed estimation and control algorithm for the controlling UAVs. By means of simulations, the validity of the modelling and the control parts is shown and promising results are derived