Analysis of Potential Fields for Formation of Multi-Agent Robots with Collision Avoidance

Some popular potential field methods to manifest circular formation and collision avoidance are investigated in this paper. By balancing potential force of overall agents in the environment, parameters for attractive repulsive potential field can be determined, especially in free obstacle environment. Furthermore, in the presence of static obstacle in the setting, the other parameters for attractive and repulsive potential are obtained by optimization method enhancing formation configuration state and input signal as the cost function. The above steps are done for three kinds of repulsive potential field. By evaluating on the performances of each potential fields, i.e. included guaranteeing safety, smoothness, and possibility to be operated in real implementation, we propose the appropriate potential field for a certain necessity.