Experimental comparison of non-collision strategies in multi-agent robots formation control

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison between two non-collision strategies for multi-agent robots formations. The control objective is to coordinate a group of agents, considered as unicycle-type robots, to achieve desired inter-agent distances avoiding collisions. The formation strategy is based on the cyclic pursuit configuration where every agent can detect another agent only. The first non-collision strategy is the standard methodology of repulsive forces obtained as the gradient of Repulsive Potential Functions. The second strategy is a novel Repulsive Vector Field based on a scaled unstable focus. The comparison is carried out both by numerical simulations and over an experimental set-up consisting of three unicycle-type robots.