Hybrid Flock - Formation Control Algorithms

Two prominent categories for achieving coordinated multirobot displacement are flocking and navigation in formation. Both categories have their own body of literature and characteristics, including their respective advantages and disadvantages. While typically, they are treated separately, we believe that a combination of flock and formation control represents a promising algorithmic solution. Such an algorithm could leverage a combination of characteristics of both categories best suited for a given situation. In this work, we therefore propose two distributed algorithms, able to gradually and reversibly shift between flocking and formation behaviors using a single parameter W. We evaluate them using both simulated and real robots with and without the presence of obstacles.We find that both algorithms successfully trade off flock density for formation error. Furthermore, using a funnel experiment as application case study, we demonstrate that an adaptive shift between flock and formation behavior, using a simple method to define W in real-time using exclusively on-board resources, results in a statistically relevant reduction of traversing time in comparison to a non-adaptive formation control algorithm.