Receding horizon particle swarm optimisation-based formation control with collision avoidance for non-holonomic mobile robots

This study proposes a novel model predictive control (MPC) based on receding horizon particle swarm optimisation (RHPSO) for formation control of non-holonomic mobile robots by incorporating collision avoidance and control input minimisation and guaranteeing asymptotic stability. In most conventional MPC approaches, the collision avoidance constraint is imposed by the 2-norm of a relative position vector at each discrete time step. Thus, multi-robot formation control problem can be formulated as a constrained non-linear optimisation problem. In general, traditional optimisation techniques suitable for addressing constrained non-linear optimisation problems take a longer computation time with an increase in the number of constraints. The traditional approaches therefore suffer from the computational complexity problem corresponding to an increase in the prediction horizon. To address this problem without a significant increase in computational complexity, a novel strategy for collision avoidance is proposed to incorporating a particle swarm optimisation. In addition, the stability conditions are derived in simplified forms that can be satisfied by selecting appropriate constant values for control gains and weight parameters. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed RHPSO-based formation control.