  Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a
mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required
control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated
on missions that a swarm can execute independently, interacting only with a
static environment and without the involvement of other active entities. In
this paper, we investigate the design of robot swarms that perform their
mission by interacting with other robots that populate their environment. We
frame our research within robot shepherding: the problem of using a small group
of robots, the shepherds, to coordinate a relatively larger group, the sheep.
In our study, the group of shepherds is the swarm that is automatically
designed, and the sheep are pre-programmed robots that populate its
environment. We use automatic modular design and neuroevolution to produce the
control software for the swarm of shepherds to coordinate the sheep. We show
that automatic design can leverage mission-specific interaction strategies to
enable an effective coordination between the two groups.
