Formation Control with Obstacle Avoidance of Multi-Robot Systems with Second-Order Dynamics

Abstract

This paper combines the leader-follower protocol with potential field and realizes a formation tracking scheme with obstacle avoidance for multi-robot systems with second-order dynamics robots. The proposed approach consists of the following contributions. First, a switching rule is applied in the control design to switch the robots from the joint formation control and obstacle avoidance (hybrid) mode to the pure formation control (pure) mode. In such a way, the computation of control signal can be simplified. Second, we use the estimated velocity of the leader in the control design of followers, such that the followers can track the arbitrarily moving leader. Third, the rotational field is combined with the traditional repulsive field to drive the robots escaping from local optima. Two groups of simulation are fcarried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.