A Dynamic Leader–Follower Approach for Line Marching of Swarm Robots

Abstract

Most of the existing exact formation algorithms for swarm systems are fully label-specified, i.e. the desired position for each individual in the formation is predetermined by its label, which would inevitably make the formation algorithms vulnerable to individual failures. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a dynamic leader–follower approach to solving the line marching problem for a swarm of planar kinematic robots. In contrast to the existing results, the desired positions for the robots in the line are no longer predetermined by the robots’ labels, but the relativity of the robots’ labels as well as their real-time relative positions. By constantly forming the leader–follower chain, exact line marching can be realized by pairwise leader–following tracking. Since the order of the leader–follower chain keeps updating, the proposed algorithm shows strong robustness against robot failures. Comprehensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed formation algorithm.