A cooperative coevolutionary approach to multi-robot formation control

This paper proposes a cooperative coevolutionary approach to multi-robot formation control. To deal with the formation control problem, the concept of a cooperative coevo-lution (CC) framework is incorporated with model predictive control (MPC) such that candidates of all robots coevolve toward a Nash equilibrium in a distributed way. Using the Nash-equilibrium strategy, the robots can quickly move to a desired formation from their initial locations. The stability is guaranteed via a novel repair algorithm that enforces each candidate to satisfy a derived condition for asymptotic stability. The cooperative coevolutionary particle swarm optimization (CCPSO) is adopted and modified to fit into the formation control problem. Simulations are performed on a group of nonholonomic mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the CC-based MPC. Also, the proposed MPC shows a better performance compared to sequential quadratic programming (SQP)-based MPC.