Formation Shaping Control for Multi-Agent Systems with Obstacle Avoidance and Dynamic Leader Selection.

This paper presents a novel approach to time-varying formation for the purpose of collision and obstacle avoidance using a displacement based formation algorithm. A team consisting of two-wheeled mobile robots as the agents is considered. A fast terminal sliding mode controller is used for the motion control of the agents. From arbitrary positions these agents move to a formation, and then navigate an unknown environment with multiple goal points. These agents use sensor data, such as measurements from ultrasonic sensors or lidar, to observe their environment and adjust the size of their formation in order to properly travel through the environment, as well as use an artificial potential field process for local collision and obstacle avoidance. This can be scaled up to any number of agents and could be applied to other types of agents. Simulations are presented which use both four and six agents, and show that the multi-agent system is capable of navigating an environment and that the leader agents will change to suit the needs of the formation as required.