Split and join of vehicle formations doing obstacle avoidance

In this paper, we study a scenario where a set of vehicles having different origins and/or destinations move in a common region. The goal is to have the vehicles join and leave formations in a completely decentralized manner. When a vehicle traveling along its own path finds itself moving close to another vehicle it automatically switches into follower mode. The vehicle stays in follower mode as long as the path of the other vehicle is beneficial to it. If, at some point, the leader is not moving towards the destination of the follower, the follower leaves the leader and head of on its own. We address this problem for a group of dynamic unicycle robots. Incorporating the split and join capability into a Receding Horizon Control approach to obstacle avoidance we are able to show safety as well as convergence of all vehicles to their destinations under general nonconvex obstacle assumptions. We illustrate the method with a simulation example.