Swarm-based cooperative control for group of mobile robots

Abstract

The accomplishment of some robotic tasks requires the coordination of a group of mobile robots, which generally outperform single robots operating independently.This chapter is devoted to the control design for deployment of multiple robots into desired geometric patterns or formations.First, a generic control struc~ ture is proposed as an unified app~o Ch, making use of its flexibility for va ions formation configurations while miti ting singularities.Swarm intelligence is then adopted in order to obtain near~optimal settings of the control parameters.Here, the cooperative control of the robots is formulated as an optimization problem, where the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to satisfy the multi-objective goal of formation establishment and collision avoidance.Numerical results and a remark on experiments are included to i1lustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for a number of formation types.