Lightweight Control Methodology for Formation Control of Vehicle Swarms
Abstract
Multi-vehicle swarms offer the potential for increased performance and robustness in several key robotic and autonomous applications. Emergent swarm behavior demonstrated in biological systems shows performance that far outstrips the abilities of the individual members. We demonstrate a lightweight formation control methodology that uses conservative potential functions to ensure group cohesion, and yet has very modest communication and control requirements for the individual nodes. Any arbitrary formation can be formed and held, even while navigating through an unstructured obstacle environment. Simulation studies demonstrate that the formation control is robust, stable, and easily implemented in a distributed fashion.
