Network weight and time-varying potential function for obstacle avoidance of swarm robots in column formation

This paper proposes network weight functions and time-varying potential functions for obstacle avoidance of swarm robots in column formation. We consider a potential function whose exponent is the distance between the robots and the obstacle for obstacle avoidance. When a robot tries to avoid an obstacle while staying in a formation, it behaves oscillatory due to the imbalance between the attraction of staying in the formation and the repulsion of avoiding the obstacle. In addition, swarm robots may become stagnant in front of large obstacles. To solve these problems, we propose two methods. The first method is to weaken the strength of the connection between robots according to their relative distance. The second method is to change the shape of the potential function depending on the relative angle between the robot and the obstacle. Numerical examples show that these methods reduce the oscillatory of the robot and alleviate the stagnation in front of the obstacle.