Obstacle avoidance and role assignment algorithms for robot formation control

An obstacle avoidance mechanism is developed in this paper for formation control of multiple mobile robots. This mechanism is designed based on the sequential situations when the robots likely have a chance to collide with each other. First, the obstacle avoidance is enabled if the distance between robot and obstacle is smaller than a designed distance and the obstacle is located on the way where the robot is moving to. Second, the time to turn on the mechanism for obstacle avoidance is decided by a predefined distance. Finally, an alternative path is generated for the robot to avoid obstacles by using a vector operation. Meanwhile, a robot behavior-based formation control is also constructed which has architecture of three levels. The developed mechanism is applied to the formation control of a group omni-directional driven robots. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient for robot formation control.