Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Strategies using Limit Cycle for the Navigation of Multi-Robot System

This paper deals with the navigation of a multirobot system (MRS). The latter must reach and maintain a specific formation in dynamic environment. In such areas, the collision avoidance between the robots themselves and with other obstacles (static and dynamic) is a challenging issue. To deal with it, a reactive and a distributed control architecture is proposed. The navigation in formation of the MRS is insured while tracking a global virtual structure. In addition, according to the robots’ perception context (e.g., static or dynamic obstacle), the most suitable obstacle avoidance strategy is activated. These approaches use mainly the limitcycle principle and a penalty function to obtain linear and angular robots’ velocities. The proposed control law guarantees the stability (using Lyapunov function) and the safety of the MRS. The robustness and the efficiency of the proposed control architecture is demonstrated through a multitude of experiments which shows the MRS in different configuration of avoidance.