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Flocking of partially-informed multi-agent systems avoiding obstacles with arbitrary shape

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the flocking problem of multi-agent systems with obstacle avoidance, in the situation when only a fraction of the agents have information on the obstacles. Obstacles of arbitrary shape are allowed, no matter if their boundary is smooth or non-smooth, and no matter it they are convex or non-convex. A novel geometry representation rule is proposed to transfer obstacles to a dense obstacle-agents lattice structure. Non-convex regions of the obstacles are detected and supplemented using a geometric rule. The uninformed agents can detect a section of the obstacles boundary using only a range position sensor. We prove that with the proposed protocol, uninformed agents which maintain a joint path with any informed agent can avoid obstacles that move uniformly and assemble around a point along with the informed agents. Eventually all the assembled agents reach consensus on their velocity. In the entire flocking process, no distinct pair of agents collide with each other, nor collide with obstacles. The assembled agents are guaranteed not to be lost in any non-convex region of the obstacles within a distance constraint. Numerical simulations demonstrate the flocking algorithm with obstacle avoidance both in 2D and 3D space. The situation when every agent is informed is considered as a special case.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61473129, 61104140, and 61273161, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University from Chinese Ministry of Education under Grant NCET-12-0215, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST: Grant No. 2014ZZGH001), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University under Grant IRT1245, and Foundation of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission under Grants J51901(FSME).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Jiaojie Li, Wei Zhang & Yupu Yang

  2. Department of Measurement and Control Technology, Shanghai Dian Ji University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Jiaojie Li

  3. School of Automation, Key Laboratory of Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Ministry of Education, National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Luoyu Road 1037, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Housheng Su

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  1. Jiaojie Li
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  2. Wei Zhang
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  4. Yupu Yang
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Correspondence to Housheng Su.

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Li, J., Zhang, W., Su, H. et al. Flocking of partially-informed multi-agent systems avoiding obstacles with arbitrary shape. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 29, 943–972 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-014-9272-2

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