Line Marching Algorithm For Planar Kinematic Swarm Robots: A Dynamic Leader-Follower Approach

Most of the existing formation algorithms for multiagent systems are fully label-specified, i.e., the desired position for each agent in the formation is uniquely determined by its label, which would inevitably make the formation algorithms vulnerable to agent 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 not fully label-specified, but determined in a dynamic way according to the current state of the robot swarm. By constantly forming a chain of leader-follower pairs, exact formation can be achieved by pairwise leader-following tracking. Since the order of the chain of leader-follower pairs is constantly updated, the proposed algorithm shows strong robustness against robot failures. Comprehensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.