Fuzzy-Based Distributed Behavioral Control With Wall-Following Strategy for Swarm Navigation in Arbitrary-Shaped Environments

Abstract

This paper addresses novel fuzzy-based distributed behavioral control with the wall-following strategy for robot swarm navigation in arbitrary-shaped environments. Instead of avoiding large-size obstacles during the swarm navigation, the proposed distributed control enables the robot swarm to follow obstacle boundaries by transforming from aggregation configuration to one-chain configuration. The wall-following strategy and one-chain configuration empower the swarm navigation to avoid local minima caused by obstacles and connectivity maintenance without dealing with the alignment control of swarm behaviours. The fuzzy-logic control is applied to calculate the parameters of the distributed control strategies. The proposed method is examined and evaluated in both simulation and real experiments.