Distance-Based Formation Maneuvering of Mobile Robots with Static Obstacles

Abstract

We introduce here a distance-based formation ma-neuvering control scheme for a group of nonholonomic mobile robots operating in 2D environments with unknown static obstacles. We merge the distance-based formation controller with the Vector Field Histogram method such that the robots temporarily separate into subsets of the full formation for obstacle avoidance purposes, thus facilitating the subsequent reassembly. The overall control system is decentralized since it only requires onboard sensors for inter-robot relative positioning and obstacle detection. We illustrate the proposed control via simulations for two typical obstacle avoidance scenarios.