A PSO-Based Approach with Fuzzy Obstacle Avoidance for Cooperative Multi-Robots in Unknown Environments

Abstract

Cooperative exploration in unknown environments is fundamentally important in robotics, where the real-time path planning and proper task allocation strategies are the key issues for multi-robot cooperation. In this paper, a PSO-based approach, combined with a fuzzy obstacle avoidance module, is proposed for cooperative robots to accomplish target searching and foraging tasks in unknown environments. The proposed cooperation strategy for a multi-robot system makes use of the potential field function as the fitness function of PSO, while the proposed fuzzy obstacle-avoidance module improves the smoothness of robot trajectory. In the simulation studies, several scenarios with and without the fuzzy module are investigated. The robot trajectory smoothness improvement is demonstrated through the comparative studies.