Flexible leadership in obstacle environment

Leader-following formation is one of the common used formation strategies, but when using this method, behavior of the leader will certainly influence behavior of other team members. In obstacle environment, a fixed leader may experience maneuver and this will destroy formation shape and increase energy consumption while not necessary. In this paper, some evaluation factors are discussed to judge formation performance, and at this basis, a flexible leader formation method is proposed. In this new strategy, leader is not confined to a single robot, but may be changed or to be arranged using several of the robots. With this new strategy, formation process can be less influenced by obstacles. Simulation is done to test performance of this method, and from the results, it can be seen that the flexible leadership method gains better performance than the fixed leader one.