Distributed Formation with Diffusive Obstacle Avoidance Control in Coordinated Mobile Robots

Abstract

We study a multitasking control problem in a group of networked mobile robots where they simultaneously have to reach a prescribed shape/formation and to move as a whole towards a desired position while avoiding any obstacles encountered during transition. We propose a modular control framework that comprises of a distributed controller for achieving the formation task and obstacle avoidance task and a centralized controller for solving the group motion task. In particular, we can independently design a controller for each individual task and obtain the unified distributed controller by a linear combination of these controllers. We prove that the unified controller solves the aforementioned multitasking control problem. An illustrative example is given to show the efficacy of our proposed approach.