Formation adaptation control of autonomous robots in a dynamic environment

This paper presents a novel approach for the adaptive formation control of multi-agent systems to track a moving target in a dynamic environment. In this approach, while the swarm reaches the target position, if it detects obstacles on the way, its size will change in order to avoid these obstacles. In special cases, such as when the space between the obstacles is narrow, then the formation of the robots will automatically shrink into a smaller size. Hence, the swarm can easily pass through this space, while the swarm´s connection is maintained. However, to avoid collisions among the robots, the swarm´s size can only reduce to a minimum desired size. If the swarm´s size is smaller than this minimum size, the swarm´s structure will be broken, and then the robots become free to avoid obstacles. In order to handle these problems, the adaptive formation control algorithm is built based on the change of the desired distance between the neighboring robots. This desired distance depends on the sum of the repulsive forces from obstacles to the swarm. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been verified in simulations.