Experimental Study of Robot Formation Control and Navigation Using Potential Functions and Panel Method

Abstract

In this paper an implementation of a collision free navigation algorithm for robot swarm based on the panel method is discussed. The well known panel method is used to solve the governing equations for inviscid incompressible potential flow around rigid objects with tangency boundary conditions, providing the robots with safe trajectories to the target. In addition, artificial potential functions are used to force the swarm to achieve a predefined geometrical shape. Experimental results are obtained using e-puck mini-robots navigating in an environment with complex shaped obstacles.