Distributed Control for Teams of Non-holonomic Mobile Robots Executing Competitive Tasks

Multi-robot systems have been widely used in a variety of applications to perform tasks cooperatively. A greater challenge is to design control when two teams of robots have to compete with each other when performing tasks. This paper presents a control algorithm for teams of differentially-driven mobile robots that perform such a task. The goal of each team is to follow an individual reference trajectory keeping the desired shape of the formation. In the transition state, the robots of one group must penetrate the other team to reach desired poses. Artificial potential functions are used to avoid collisions. They are shaped to reduce the risk of deadlocks between groups of robots. Numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.