Time-varying Formation Tracking with Collision Avoidance for Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

This paper studies the collision avoidance problem in the time-varying formation tracking control for multi-agent systems. The proposed control strategy is decentralized, since agents have no global knowledge of the goal to achieve, knowing only the position and velocity of some agents. This control strategy allows a set of mobile agents to track a predetermined trajectory while they achieve a time-varying formation. For the collision avoidance, we add a repulsive vector field of the unstable focus type to the time-varying formation tracking control law. A leader-followers scheme is employed, using formation graphs to represent interactions between agents. The results are presented for the front points of differential-drive mobile robots. The theoretical results are verified by numerical simulation.