Flexible Formation Control for Obstacle Avoidance Based on Numerical Flow Field

This paper presents a novel approach to obstacle avoidance for a group of robots moving in formation. This idea is originally inspired by a phenomenon in hydrodynamics. In this approach, a virtual robot is introduced as a reference point (beacon) to determine a collision-free trajectory. Taking the virtual point as a basic point, the robot group establish a rigid body-like formation. Since the collision-freeness of the virtual robot does not guarantee all other robots avoiding obstacles, we employ a flexible formation control scheme in the framework of rigid body-like formation. Two kinds of transformation are introduced to help every robot negotiate obstacles. This approach gives a new principle to deal with obstacle avoidance in formation control for multi-robot system. Simulation results are presented to verify its effectiveness