Leader-Follower Control and Collision Avoidance for the Formation of Differentially-Driven Mobile Robots

摘要

This paper presents leader-follower formation control algorithm with built-in collision avoidance behavior. The robots are differentially-driven nonholonomic mobile platforms. The only robot that knows the desired trajectory of the formation plays the role of the leader. The rest of robots form a queue in which each robot except the last one (that is only a follower) has a single follower and follows also one robot. The task of the followers is to keep relative offset in both spatial coordinates with respect to preceding robot. In addition the information about the control signals is transmitted from the leader to its follower. Artificial potential functions are used to guarantee interagent collision avoidance. When the safety zone of the agent is violated the reference linear velocity is temporarily suspended to resolve collision avoidance problem which has the higher priority. Stability analysis of the closed-loop system is presented. Numerical simulations that confirm effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are included.