Distributed coordination with connectivity maintenance for nonholonomic robots

Abstract

Abstract Multirobot systems have been studied extensively in the recent years. Maintaining connectivity has significant impacts on the stability and convergence of the multirobot systems. In this work, we design a three‐layer framework for multirobot coordination. Furthermore, a novel distributed algorithm is proposed to achieve the navigation objective while satisfying connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance constraints. The algorithm is a hybrid of an rapidly exploring random tree‐based planner and an extended distributed navigation function‐based controller. The coordination framework and the distributed algorithm are demonstrated to be effective through a series of illustrative simulations. They outperform the current state‐of‐the‐art method in terms of efficiency and applicability.