Moving Obstacle Avoidance and Topology Recovery for Multi-agent Systems

This paper proposes a novel moving obstacle avoidance algorithm for multi-agent systems. The method has robustness in maintaining formation shape. Even if link failure occurs among agents when avoiding obstacles, the communication topology of the system can be recovered based on the conditions we obtain. The main idea includes two parts, i) a flexible function of relative velocities and positions between agents and obstacles is designed to avoid moving/stationary obstacles, and ii) based on initial adjacent matrix and graph connection characteristic, a topology recover mechanism is proposed to guarantee formation shape and no extra links are involved. The proposed algorithm has the following advantages: i) It is able to recover formation shape, even if some links among agents are broken while avoiding moving obstacles; ii) In the process of rebuilding communication links, the proposed algorithm can protect communication topology from being altered maliciously. Furthermore, we obtain conditions of the topology recovery for both directed and undirected graph. Some simulations are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.