Behavioral-based circular formation control for robot swarms

Unfortunately, we observe that the common employed Collision Cone Control Barrier Function (C3BF) [15]-[18] Formation control, one of the most actively studied topics is not enough to guarantee a collision-free environment when within multi-robot systems, aims to coordinate multiple robots unicycles cannot brake. For example, one robot might have to spatially since its practical applications in current robotic take an impossible decision to avoid two robots, i.e., to turn to challenges [1]. The idea of formation can be understood in the right and to the left simultaneously. To solve this problem, different ways. One way is by looking at how robots are we present a scalable overtaking rule, that in combination positioned in relation to each other, like how far apart they with an adaptive-collision radius, and the guiding vector field are or the angles between them, also known as distance-based presented in [19], ensures a collision-free environment for and bearing-based formation control, respectively [2]. Another unicycles that follow the same path with constant but different way, called the behavioral approach, does not worry too much speeds. In particular, the usage of the guiding vector field about exact positions but keeps cohesion and ensures robots in [19], [20] facilitates one mild condition so that we can do not crash into each other [3]. Although the bio-inspired extend the results to convex closed paths. In addition, the and heuristic strategies fit more into the latter approach [4], decision making process is completely distributed, i.e., there there also exist rigorous behavioral-based studies [5]. is no centralized computation with global information, but an In this paper, we present and analyze rigorously a circular individual robot can figure out a safe action to avoid a collision formation algorithm that fits more into the behavioralbased on its own with local information and, more importantly, it approach, in the sense that we aim at the order that will not harm others' decisions concerning their safety as it emerges from having a large number of robots following the is crucial to scale up robot swarms [9], [10].