Predator-Prey Interactions Through Heterogeneous Coverage Control Using Reaction-Diffusion Processes

A predator-prey interaction scheme based on a heterogeneous cooperative control strategy driven by reaction-diffusion processes is investigated in this paper, where the heterogeneity is understood along five modalities in terms of the dynamics of predator and prey. The predators are modeled as individual agents whereas the prey are modeled as space-time dependent densities. A decentralized coverage controller for predators with heterogeneous mobility, encoded by multiplicatively weighted Voronoi cells, is derived so that the predators can optimally react to the time-varying prey distributions. The predator-prey interaction scheme can be adopted in diverse application scenarios. An experiment of deploying a multi-robot system across a two-dimensional domain pictorially representing a forest in which ideally modeled wildfires need to be put out demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme.