Swarm control for large-scale omnidirectional mobile robots within incremental behavior

In this paper, the swarm control for large-scale omnidirectional mobile robots (OMRs) within incremental behavior is proposed to imitate the confluence behavior of animals during migration. In previous work, the number of OMRs in the swarm system was small and immutable. As such, the system lacked flexibility for swarm systems in practical applications. To solve these problems, we make several innovations. Firstly, OMRs within incremental behavior are proposed. Based on this, the incremental system of OMRs within incremental behavior is designed when the original swarm system needs assistance to form an incremental swarm system, which allows the incremental behavior happens among different swarm systems and the formation of each incremental system unchanged. Notably, incremental updating method based on second-order communication topology is proposed to update the adjacency matrix and the state matrix instead of creating a new swarm system. Then, to solve the pressure caused by the increasing number of OMRs in incremental swarm systems on calculating and storage, the incremental swarm system of large-scale OMRs based on second-order communication topology is introduced to rank the system and weaken the strong coupling relationship. In this case, the swarm control for a large-scale incremental swarm system is proposed through the backstepping method. The Lyapunov function is designed to prove the stability of the proposed controller. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.