Flexible and Scalable Formation for Unicycle Robots

This paper presents a self-organizing scheme for multi-agent swarm systems based on coupled nonlinear oscillators (CNOs). In this scheme, unicycle robots self-organize to flock and arrange group formation through attractive and repulsive forces among themselves. It is also shown how localized distributed controls are utilized throughout group behaviors such as formation and migration. In the paper, the proposed formation ensures safe separation and good cohesion performance among the robots. Several examples show that the proposed method for group formation performs the group behaviors such as reference path following, obstacle avoidance and flocking, and the formation characteristics such as flexibility and scalability, effectively.