Multi Robot Swarm - 1 Obstacle

Multi-vehicle swarms offer the potential for increased performance and robustness in several key robotic and autonomous applications. Emergent swarm behavior demonstrated in biological systems shows performance that far outstrips the abilities of the individual members. We demonstrate a lightweight formation control methodology that uses conservative potential functions to ensure group cohesion, and yet has very modest communication and control requirements for the individual nodes. Any arbitrary formation can be formed and held, even while navigating through an unstructured obstacle environment. Simulation studies demonstrate that the formation control is robust, stable, and easily implemented in a distributed fashion.

The key insight into this form of formation control is that the forces from the artificial potential functions (attraction to center of mass, repulsion from each other and obstacles) are not used to determine the trajectory. Rather, the forces in the current formation are used to determine the initial departure, the equilibrium where the forces are zero determines the short term goal, and each individual node plans its own trajectory to that goal. Thus the control is a simple trajectory following, and this trajectory is replanned in a receding horizon fashion. This ensures collision free trajectories, as well as well behaved dynamics and damping.

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~elkaim/elkaim/Distributed%20Swarm.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• robots
• swarm control
• IFAC
• multi robot system
• robot swarm
• robot flock
• UCSC
• Mikey Siegel