Decentralized Multi-Robot Encirclement of a 3D Target with Guaranteed Collision Avoidance
This addresses the challenge of coordinated target encirclement in 3D environments for robotics applications, representing an incremental improvement with formal guarantees.
The paper tackled the problem of controlling a multi-robot system to encircle a moving 3D target with collision avoidance, proposing a decentralized framework with local communication and validating it through simulations and experiments on various robot types.
We present a control framework for achieving encirclement of a target moving in 3D using a multi-robot system. Three variations of a basic control strategy are proposed for different versions of the encirclement problem, and their effectiveness is formally established. An extension ensuring maintenance of a safe inter-robot distance is also discussed. The proposed framework is fully decentralized and only requires local communication among robots; in particular, each robot locally estimates all the relevant global quantities. We validate the proposed strategy through simulations on kinematic point robots and quadrotor UAVs, as well as experiments on differential-drive wheeled mobile robots.