Collision-free Circle Formation Control for Mobile Robots with Velocity Constraints

Circle formation is a type of cooperative task for multiple mobile robots that attracts lots of attentions in both research work and engineering applications. In order to be successfully applied to robots, many factors, such as collision avoidance, velocity or acceleration constraints, distributed execution, should be considered in design of circle formation control laws. However, few works have integrated them all. This paper design a circle formation control law taking all the above features into account. Despite the strong nonlinearity of the law due to the introduced hyperbolic tangent function for velocity constraints, the convergence and collision avoidance are all proved. The effectiveness of the law is demonstrated by simulations.