Formation Control of Multi-Robot System with Collision and Obstacle Avoidance by Novel APF

This research article develops a novel artificial potential field (APF) for a mobile robot swarm of second-order dynamics. The mobile robot swarm follows a leader-follower structure for trajectory tracking and distributed formation control. The paper has mainly two contributions. One is the development of an artificial potential field by exponential terms that can successfully avoid obstacles and collision among the agents. The second is introduction of a rotational field that, combined with the novel APF successfully avoids the local minimum in the robot motion path. The robots can successfully form the desired shape before and after the obstacle avoidance. The results are compared with traditional APF and a very recent method. The numerical simulations show the superiority of the proposed scheme.