A PSO-based approach with fuzzy obstacle avoidance for cooperative multi-robots in unknown environments

Cooperative exploration in unknown environments is fundamentally important in robotics, where the realtime path planning and proper task allocation strategies are desirable for multi-robot cooperation. In this paper, a PSO-based approach, combined with a fuzzy obstacle avoidance module, is proposed for cooperative robots to accomplish the target searching tasks in unknown environments. The proposed cooperation strategy for a multi-robot system makes use of the potential field function as the fitness function of PSO, while the proposed fuzzy obstacle-avoidance method can improve the robot trajectory smoothness. In the simulation studies, various scenarios are investigated and compared to the method without fuzzy rules. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the robot trajectory smoothness improvement are demonstrated by simulation and comparison studies.