Group robot control in non-deterministic environments using the potential field method

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to describe the method of group robot control in non-deterministic environments. Here the group structure is proposed for creation with the use of space lattice concept minimizing the computational cost for robot to determine its spatial position in the ranks of the structure. The stages of the solution of two interrelated tasks of robot group motion organization using the method of potential fields are considered: task of trajectory planning of the group considered as a uniform structure in the global coordinate space and the task of planning of the individual trajectory of each mobile robot in the considered structure. As main results, we propose the concept of structure formation for the robot groups using the space lattice and the algorithm of group robot control. To confirm the efficiency of our method we presented some simulation results with the groups including up to five autonomous mobile robots.