A Hybrid Path Planning and Formation Control Strategy of Multi-Robots in a Dynamic Environment

This paper proposes a hybrid path planning and formation control strategy for multi-robots in a dynamic environment. Under a leader-follower formation structure, the followers can track the motion of one leader after the leader’s path is determined. First, a hybrid path planning strategy that contains global path planning and local path planning of the leader is investigated, in which an improved hybrid grey wolf optimizer with whale optimizer algorithm (GWO-WOA) is designed for the global path planning in a given map, meanwhile, a dynamic window approach (DWA) is fused for the local path planning to avoid dynamic obstacles. Then, a leader-follower formation control algorithm is proposed for multiple mobile robots. The followers are controlled to track their corresponding virtual robots which are generated according to the leader’s position and the formation. Finally, simulation experiments are given to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in different environments.