Collaborative Formation And Path Planning Of Multiple Mobile Robots

In recent years,robots have become more and more widely used and have penetrated almost all areas.Multiple robotics is a new direction for the development of robotics.In a complex environment,through the cooperation of a plurality of robots to complete a predetermined task can greatly improve the efficiency and reliability of the robot and its system during the operation process.Multi-robot coordination has attracted the attention of scholars both at home and abroad as a new form of robot application since the 1980s.As an important branch of the robotics discipline,mobile robots have attracted more and more attention from experts and scholars due to its applications in intelligent transportation,marine exploration,planetary exploration,nuclear power stations,firefighting,military,and aerospace.For example,the mobile robot community using in the military field can more effectively substitute soldiers for performing dangerous tasks such as reconnaissance and demining by maintaining a reasonable formation.This thesis focuses on the collaborative formation and path planning of multi-mobile robots in order to achieve efficient and orderly movement of multi-mobile robots and accomplish specific tasks.Firstly,this thesis makes use of vector field histogram method for path planning of a single mobile robot and analyzes the deficiency of this method to improve it.At the same time,the artificial potential field method is used to carry out path planning for a single mobile robot in the same environment,and the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods are compared to obtain a better path planning method for the artificial potential field model.In addition,this thesis proposes an improved strategy for the problems of the artificial potential field method that can easily fall into local minimums and inaccessible goals,and verifies the correctness and effectiveness of the improved strategy.Then,using the improved artificial potential field method to design the active obstacle avoidance strategy of the leading robot.On this basis,the following leader method was introduced to control the formation of robots and the active obstacle avoidance strategy between followers and followers was proposed.Thus,multiple robots complete the formation obstacle avoidance while planning a collision-free path from the starting point to the end point.Finally,considering the global path planning problem of multi-robots,this thesis first uses the grid method to establish a grid map as the working environment of the robot path planning,and then uses the improved ant colony algorithm to search for a shortest path from the starting point to the end point for the leading robot.Based on the path planning of the leader robot,this thesis will combine the l-l formation in following leaders to form a better path for the followers from the starting point to the end point,so as to achieve a certain formation while avoiding obstacles for the multi-mobile robot group.