Formation constrained multi-robot system in unknown environments

This paper explores the application of the behavior-based approach to path planning for multiple mobile robots performing a formation control task in unknown environments. To predict the positions of moving obstacles for the purpose of collision avoidance, parabola prediction model whose parameters are estimated by the recurrence least square algorithm with restricted scale is adopted. Then, on the basis of the task and environment, we adopt five primitive behaviors and design a series of generation functions to generate control parameters for behaviors´ combination. Furthermore, as the outputs of these functions can be adjusted according to the current situation, thus robots can achieve a motion strategy by reasonably combining behaviors and the adaptability to the environment is improved. We illustrate the validity of the approach by the simulations.