Distributed Control for a Robotic Swarm to Pass through a Curve Virtual Tube
This addresses the challenge of safe and efficient swarm navigation in constrained spaces, such as corridors or doorframes, for robotics applications, representing an incremental improvement with specific performance gains.
The paper tackles the problem of guiding a robotic swarm through narrow, cluttered environments by designing a curve virtual tube as a safety zone and proposing a distributed controller with three control terms. The result is a finite-time solution validated by simulations and experiments, showing advantages in calculation speed over a control barrier function method.
Robotic swarm systems are now becoming increasingly attractive for many challenging applications. The main task for any robot is to reach the destination while keeping a safe separation from other robots and obstacles. In many scenarios, robots need to move within a narrow corridor, through a window or a doorframe. In order to guide all robots to move in a cluttered environment, a curve virtual tube with no obstacle inside is carefully designed in this paper. There is no obstacle inside the tube, namely the area inside the tube can be seen as a safety zone. Then, a distributed swarm controller is proposed with three elaborate control terms: a line approaching term, a robot avoidance term and a tube keeping term. Formal analysis and proofs are made to show that the curve virtual tube passing problem can be solved in a finite time. For the convenience in practical use, a modified controller with an approximate control performance is put forward. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulations and real experiments. To show the advantages of the proposed method, the comparison between our method and the control barrier function method is also presented in terms of calculation speed.