Distributed Control within a Trapezoid Virtual Tube Containing Obstacles for Robotic Swarms Subject to Speed Constraints

TL;DR

This paper extends a virtual tube control method for robotic swarms to include static obstacles and speed constraints, ensuring safe passage through complex environments with proven formal guarantees and validated by simulations and real experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel switching logic for obstacle avoidance within a virtual tube framework, accommodating speed constraints and providing formal safety proofs.

Findings

Robots can safely navigate through obstacle-filled virtual tubes.

The method is validated through simulations and real-world experiments.

Abstract

In our previous work, we design a trapezoid virtual tube to guide robotic swarms through narrow openings. This paper extends the application of the trapezoid virtual tube to the situations where there are static obstacles inside and robots have strict speed constraints. We first propose a distributed swarm controller for the trapezoid virtual tube without obstacles and present the relationship between the trapezoid virtual tube and speed constraints. Then a switching logic for obstacle avoidance is proposed by dividing the trapezoid virtual tube containing static obstacles into several sub trapezoid virtual tubes without obstacles. Formal analyses and proofs are presented to demonstrate that all robots can pass through the trapezoid virtual tube safely. Besides, we validate the effectiveness of our method through numerical simulations and real experiments.