A grid-based approach to formation reconfiguration in cluttered environments

In this paper, we propose an architecture for formation reconfiguration of a team of autonomous agents navigating within an obstacle-populated environment. Our approach is based on abstracting the agent formation by a rectangular grid. We develop a coordination strategy that ensures collision-free transitions between arbitrarily defined formations. This coordination strategy is based on a well-established control design methodology for manufacturing systems. Group navigation is achieved by integrating a waypoint planner with a novel grid-based formation reconfiguration controller. The proposed hybrid architecture is capable of driving a group of agents through a cluttered environment, while maintaining specified formation constraints. Simulation results verify the validity of our methodology.