Control input design for a robot swarm maintaining safety distances in crowded environment

Abstract

We consider an autonomous and decentralized mobile robotic swarm that does not require an advanced communication system; moreover, each robot must pass a narrow space preserving the distance with other robots. The control barrier function (CBF) method is useful for robotic swarms to guarantee collision avoidance. However, introducing CBF inequalities can cancel other objectives and sometimes causes a deadlock problem. Therefore, we introduce a coupled oscillator system to generate asymmetric global order by itself to avoid deadlock. By generating an effective global order in the swarm, each robot adequately moves to a target position without requiring high-cost communication systems.