A formation cooperative reconnaissance strategy for multi-UGVs in partially unknown environment

ABSTRACT Recently, multiple unmanned ground vehicles (multi-UGVs) have attracted a great deal of attention as viable solutions to a wide variety of military and civilian applications. Among many topics in the field of multi-UGVs, the formation cooperative reconnaissance is of great importance, which helps to concentrate firepower to suppress and eliminate the suspicious enemies. This paper presents a formation cooperative reconnaissance strategy for multi-UGVs to explore all the unknown areas in the environment, which is similar to the human soldiers paraded on patrol. First, the frontier-based exploration algorithm is proposed to get the reconnaissance targets in the unknown areas which is modeled as a global grid map. Then, A*-based multi-target path planning is applied to find the right exploring order of reconnaissance targets. Lastly, the distance-angle leader-follower formation control laws are designed to make the multi-UGVs rapidly form a desired formation after assigning a reconnaissance goal. The experiment results show that all the reconnaissance targets are searched and explored. The follower UGVs are gradually adjusting their position and orientation to follow the leader UGV while moving to each reconnaissance target sequentially. The motion of the multi-UGVs is reliable. Especially, the average position and heading errors of formation are less than 0.2%.