Coordination Control with Collision Avoidance for Multiagent Systems with Underactuated Agent Dynamics

A coordinated control framework for multiagent systems using sliding mode control approach was developed in (Ghasemi and Nersesov, 2013). The framework addresses a general class of underactuated agents and presents a specialization to the agents represented by wheeled mobile robots. In this paper, we extend the results of (Ghasemi and Nersesov, 2013) to incorporate the obstacle/collision avoidance algorithm into the overall coordination control routine. Obstacle avoidance is achieved by surrounding the stationary as well as moving obstacles by elliptical or other convex shapes that serve as stable periodic solutions to planar systems of ordinary differential equations and using transient trajectories of those systems to navigate the agents around the obstacles. We experimentally validate the efficacy of our theoretical approach using two wheeled mobile robots that reach and maintain a desired formation in the presence of the obstacles while avoiding collisions.