A switching formation strategy for obstacle avoidance of multi-robot system

Abstract

This paper describes a switching formation strategy for multiple robots, in order to avoid an obstacle and cross obstacles. In the strategy, a leader robot plans a safe path using geometric obstacle avoidance control method (GOACM). By calculating a new desired distance and desired bearing angle with the leader robot, the follower robots follow the leader robot, in a safe switching formation. The adaptive controller guarantees that the robot's trajectory and velocity tracking errors converge to zero with the consideration of the uncertainties in kinematic and dynamic models. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.