A switching formation strategy for obstacle avoidance of multi-robot system

This paper describes a switching formation strategy for multiple robots, in order to avoid an obstacle and cross obstacles. In the strategy, a leader robot plans a safe path using geometric obstacle avoidance control method (GOACM). By calculating a new desired distance and desired bearing angle with the leader robot, the follower robots follow the leader robot, in a safe switching formation. The adaptive controller guarantees that the robot´s trajectory and velocity tracking errors converge to zero with the consideration of the uncertainties in kinematic and dynamic models. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.