Formation Control of Mobile Robots with Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract

This paper is concerned 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 their virtual structures. However, in the presence of obstacles, the real robots may not be able to avoid them even if the corresponding virtual robots can avoid. In this paper, we remedy this difficulty by improving the virtual structure approach. To be more precise, each robot is applied a new formation control law which incorporates the potential function of the distance between the robot and obstacles, and takes trade-off between the formation maintenance and the obstacle avoidance by adaptive switching of the feedback gains. The effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified by numerical simulations.