Obstacle Avoidance with Formation Kept for Multi-agent

In this paper, we present a new approach to obstacle avoidance for a group of agents moving in a formation. The goal of the group is to move through a partially unknown environment with obstacles and keep the formation until they have reached the destination. The approach proposed treats the multi-agent in the formation as a whole, and sets a free region for all the agents, in which the agents can keep the formation and avoid the obstacles. Consequently, the problem of obstacle avoidance of each agent is transformed to the problem for the leader to look for the free region around the obstacles. We illustrate the method with an example. The simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed obstacle avoidance method.

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