A Multi-Step Predictive Formation Control Algorithm with Internal Collision Avoidance

This paper presents a coordinated formation control method for a multi-agent system to ensure collision avoidance among agents. The aim is to enable agents to achieve the desired spatial configuration through safe and collision-free paths. By predicting future states and sharing information, the method addresses detected collisions in the predictive time domain. Key components include the agents’ predictive model, planned formation trajectories, cost function for control and collision avoidance strategy, which form a solvable optimization problem to ensure the achievement of control objectives. Additionally, collision detection only considers neighbors within a finite distance as obstacles, reducing the number of collision constraints and thus computation time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through numerical simulations.