Formation Tracking Control and Obstacle Avoidance of Unicycle-Type Robots Guaranteeing Continuous Velocities

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems
• Artificial Intelligence

Background:

• Coordinating multiple robots for formation tracking presents challenges, especially when integrating obstacle avoidance.
• Existing methods often require global positioning or environmental maps, limiting scalability and applicability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel, fully distributed kinematic control scheme for unicycle robots.
• To simultaneously achieve formation tracking and obstacle avoidance without a global coordinate system or environmental map.

Main Methods:

• A consensus-based control formulation integrating the leader into the formation.
• A hierarchical scheme to manage the interplay between formation tracking and obstacle avoidance.
• Ensuring continuous robot velocities and proven stability during task transitions.

Main Results:

• The proposed distributed control scheme effectively combines formation tracking and obstacle avoidance.
• The approach is scalable, generic for desired formations, and does not require a global coordinate system.
• Stability is proven even during transitions between formation tracking and obstacle avoidance tasks.

Conclusions:

• This work introduces a groundbreaking distributed control strategy for multi-robot formation control with integrated obstacle avoidance.
• The method offers significant advantages in scalability, flexibility, and operational robustness compared to existing approaches.
• Simulations and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed control scheme.