Cooperative Encirclement Control for a Group of Targets by Decentralized Robots with Collision Avoidance

This study focuses on multi-target capture and encirclement control problem for multiple mobile robots. With the distributed architecture, this problem involves a group of robots to encircle several moving targets in a coordinated circle formation. In order to efficiently allocate the targets to robots, a Hybrid Dynamic Task Allocation (HDTA) algorithm was proposed, in which a temporary “manager” robot was assigned to negotiate with other robots. For encirclement formation, a robust control law was introduced for any number of mobile robots to form a specific circle formation with arbitrary inter-robot angular spacing. In view of safety, an online collision avoidance algorithm combining the sub-targets and Artificial Potential Fields (APF) approaches was proposed, which ensures that the paths of robots are collision-free. To prove the validity and robustness of the proposed scheme, both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments were conducted.