Priority tagged Artificial Potential Field Swarm Formation Control through Narrow Corridors

Abstract

Cooperative missions carried out by multiagent systems consisting of aerial agents such as UAV or MAV have immense application in surveillance, reconnaissance, exploration, search-and-rescue, etc. Some of these applications require these swarms to navigate through complicated environments such as urban areas consisting of narrow corridors or channels. The formation control of the multiagent system has to accommodate for tangibility in the formation structure in order to navigate through such tight spaces without much congestion amongst the individuals of the swarm. A congested swarm is prone to interagent collisions or collisions with the environment leading to complete failure of the mission. This paper proposes a congestion-relieving method for formation control of a swarm using priority tags on individuals based on Artificial Potential Fields (APF). Based on the formation equilibrium study for the swarm, a minimum distance is calculated as a threshold to classify the swarm as dense or sparse and detect congestion due to narrow corridor navigation. The key feature of the proposed formation control is its decentralized nature which allows scalability and flexibility on large multiagent systems as it requires only limited local information to generate the formation structure. Numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of priority-tagged APF while navigating through narrow corridors and the results are discussed by comparing performance without priority tags.