Event-Triggered Indirect Herding Control of a Cooperative Agent

This work explores the indirect herding control problem for a single pursuer agent regulating a single target agent to a goal location. To accommodate the constraints of sensing hardware, an event-triggered inter-agent influence model between the pursuer agent and target agent is considered. Motivated by fielded sensing systems, we present an event-triggered controller and trigger mechanism that satisfies a user-selected minimum inter-event time. The combined pursuer-target system is presented as a switched system that alternates between stable and unstable modes. A dwell-time analysis is completed to develop a closed-form solution for the maximum time the pursuer agent can allow the target agent to evolve in the unstable mode before requiring a control input update. The presented trigger function is designed to produce inter-event times that are upper-bounded by the maximum dwell time. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through both simulated and experimental studies, where a pursuer agent successfully regulates a target agent to a desired goal location.