Formation control of autonomous robots to track a moving target in an unknown environment

This paper presents a novel approach to path planning for the formation of a swarm of autonomous robots to track a moving target in an unknown environment. This approach is based on the traditional potential fields combined with the rotational vector field. The potential field is used to repel the robots away from obstacles while the rotational vector field is added to drive robots to avoid obstacles in the direction of the target's trajectory. Under the effect of the blended vector field, autonomous robots can easily escape obstacles in order to quickly reach the target. In this approach, the neighboring robots in a swarm will be linked to each other by the attractive and the repulsive vector field between them in order to generate a stable formation. Moreover, information about obstacles, which each member robot detects from the environment, will be sent to all other member robots in the swarm. Hence, the formation of the swarm is maintained while tracking a moving target. The effectiveness of this proposed approach has been verified in simulations.