A Swarm Control Model Based on Individual Information Interaction

Abstract

A new swarm control model is proposed in this study to address the problem that swarm-robot systems have difficulty in effectively avoiding obstacles and maintaining formation in unknown and complex environments. The proposed swarm control model combines the virtual leader method and the artificial potential field method to solve the problem of easy collision and separation during the movement of a swarm-robot system. In addition, in the proposed control model, the individuals in the swarm-robot system can emerge swarm movement only by some simple behavior rules, thus improving the intelligence of the swarm-robot system. At last, the study sets two repre-sentative environments (a no-obstacles environment and a static and dynamic mixed obstacle environment), which illustrates the performance of the proposed model.