Mobile robots cooperative control and obstacle avoidance using potential field

Formation control of mobile robots based on the virtual and behavioral structures is proposed in this paper. To achieve this goal, each robot is modeled by an electric charge, and a trajectory is defined to move the robots toward a circle. Because of the repulsive force between the identical charges, each robot finds its desired position in the formation, and the regular polygon formation of the robots will be realized. For swarm formation, a moving virtual robot is located at the center of the circle, and the formation keeping is guaranteed. An approach for obstacle avoidance of mobile robots based on the behavioral structure is proposed as well. When a robot approaches an obstacle, a force obtained based on a rotational potential field makes it avoid collision and also locating in local minima positions. The illustrative examples and numerical simulations confirm the feasibility of the proposed approaches.