Formation control of mobile robots with obstacle avoidance

This paper deals with a formation control problem of nonholonomic mobile robots with obstacle avoidance. It is known that the mobile robots can achieve an arbitrary formation asymptotically by using virtual structures of the robots. However, in the presence of some obstacles, the real robots may not be able to avoid them even if the corresponding virtual robots can avoid. In this paper, we improve the virtual structure approach in order to remedy this difficulty. The proposed formation control law for each robot incorporates a potential function of the distance between the robot and obstacles, and takes trade-off between the formation maintainance and the obstacle avoidance by adaptive control switching. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a numerical simulation.