Evolutionary algorithm-based formation control and collision avoidance for multiple mobile robots

In this paper, we propose a novel evolutionary algorithm(EA)-based formation control with collision avoidance for nonholonomic mobile robots. In most conventional approaches, multi-robot formation control problem with collision avoidance can be formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem in model predictive control (MPC) framework. The conventional approaches, therefore, suffer from the computational complexity problem corresponding to an increase in the number of constraints. To address this problem, a novel collision avoidance strategy is proposed incorporating a particle swarm optimization (PSO), which is one of the EAs. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.