Abstract In this article, we propose a navigation approach based on a flocking algorithm for multiple agents that discover the environment with their sensors. The proposed method is able to move the agents in a flexible formation that preserves a pattern that minimizes a measure of energy, but is also able to avoid collision with obstacles while maintaining communication and visibility between agents. Control laws are combined with a new version of the planner called the Nearness Diagram (ND), extended to multiple agents. Two central ideas in the approach are: (1) the global leader of the formation can change, selecting as global leader one that has favorable conditions to reach the goal, (2) each agent locally follows another agent, the agent that is followed minimizes a cost related to the shortest path to the global leader in a graph. The method is intensively validated with several computer simulations, implemented in differential-drive robots. The results showed that the approach maintains communication formation and flexible enough to allow agents to line up when narrow passages appear in the environment.
Rodriguez-Ortiz et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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