A lightweight formation control methodology for a swarm of non-holonomic vehicles

Multi-vehicle swarms offer the potential for increased performance and robustness in several key robotic and autonomous applications. Emergent swarm behavior demonstrated in biological systems show performance that far outstrips the abilities of the individual members. This paper discusses a lightweight formation control methodology using conservative potential functions to ensure group cohesion, yet requiring very modest communication and control requirements for each individual node. Previous efforts have demonstrated distributed methods to navigate a vehicle swarm through a complex obstacle environment while remaining computationally simple and having low bandwidth requirements. It is shown that arbitrary formation can be held and morphed within the lightweight framework. Simulations of the lightweight framework applied to realistic nonholonomic tricycle vehicles highlight the swarm's ability to form arbitrary formations from random initial vehicle distributions and formation morphing capabilities, as well as navigate complex obstacle fields while maintaining formation. The non-holonomic constraints are used to implement realistic controls.