Evolutionary Algorithm-based Formation Control and Collision Avoidance for Multiple Mobile Robots

In this paper, we propose a novel evolutionary algorithm ( EA)-based formation control with collision avoidance for nonholonomic mobile robots. In most conventional approaches, multi-robot formation control problem with collision avoidance can be formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem in model predictive control ( MPC) framework. The conventional approaches, therefore, suffer from the computational complexity problem corresponding to an increase in the number of constraints. To address this problem, a novel collision avoidance strategy is proposed incorporating a particle swarm optimization ( PSO), which is one of the EAs. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.