Multi-robot consensus formation based on virtual spring obstacle avoidance

Abstract. A systematic improvement of the multi-robot formation control algorithm has been developed to address multi-robot formation instability. First, a static obstacle avoidance model based on spring force mapping is proposed, followed by an analysis of the influence of static and dynamic obstacles on the processing of multi-robot cooperative motion. Second, a leader is introduced to the formation to save computational costs. Third, the Velocity Obstacle (VO) algorithm is improved to resolve robot collisions during the dynamic mobility process caused by the increased number of multi-robot formations. Simultaneously, the dynamic speed limit function based on the position error for formation keeping is established. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out. Results show that when 5-robot and 20-robot formations were compared in the environment without dynamic conflict, the average value of the position error of 20-robot formations only increased by 39.47 %, and the average value of the path length did not differ significantly. In the dynamic conflict environment, the maximum position error of 20-robot formations increases by 73.03 % and the path length average value increases by 7.69 %. Our proposed method can control the motion of multiple robots in both conflict-free and conflict-filled environments, resulting in an effective motion planning scheme.