IJCAS

In the research of flocking control algorithm with obstacle avoidance, the constraints of obstacle information, shape and boundary limit their practical applications. To relax these constraints, we assume that the agent can only perceive the position of static obstacle boundary points within its sensing radius, and propose a virtual-leader split/rejoin-based flocking control algorithm with obstacle avoidance. In this algorithm, the virtual-leader is divided into target virtual-leader and bypass virtual-leader, the bypass virtual-leader is designed to lead the agent to move along the boundary of static obstacles, and the target virtual-leader is designed to lead multi-agents split by static obstacles perturbation to re-aggregate and realize the group objective following. Additionally, the position cooperation term is designed to realize the separation and aggregation between agents and between the agent and static obstacle boundary points, and the velocity consensus term is designed to realize velocity matching. Then, the sufficient conditions that the agent does not collide are demonstrated. Finally, it is further verified by simulations that the proposed algorithm can relax the constraints of obstacle shape and boundary, and achieve better environmental adaptability.

Keywords: Flocking control, multi-agents, obstacle avoidance, virtual-leader split/rejoin.