Line Marching Algorithm For Planar Kinematic Swarm Robots: A Dynamic Leader-Follower Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic leader-follower algorithm for line formation in swarm robots, enhancing robustness by avoiding fixed labels and allowing the formation to adapt to robot failures through continuous chain updates.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamic leader-follower approach that determines robot positions based on current states, improving robustness over traditional label-specified methods.

Findings

The algorithm successfully maintains formation despite robot failures.

Numerical results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the approach.

The method adapts to changing swarm configurations in real-time.

Abstract

Most of the existing formation algorithms for multiagent systems are fully label-specified, i.e., the desired position for each agent in the formation is uniquely determined by its label, which would inevitably make the formation algorithms vulnerable to agent failures. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a dynamic leader-follower approach to solving the line marching problem for a swarm of planar kinematic robots. In contrast to the existing results, the desired positions for the robots in the line are not fully label-specified, but determined in a dynamic way according to the current state of the robot swarm. By constantly forming a chain of leader-follower pairs, exact formation can be achieved by pairwise leader-following tracking. Since the order of the chain of leader-follower pairs is constantly updated, the proposed algorithm shows strong robustness against robot failures. Comprehensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.