A Flexible Distributed Control Strategy for Teams of Vehicles Moving within Severe Obstacle Scenarios

In this paper, a distributed model predictive control scheme is developed for addressing the obstacle avoidance problem for a group of unmanned ground vehicles moving in unknown and planar environments. The proposed strategy exploits a switching control architecture where the vehicle formation can be conveniently organized in two different typologies, namely grid and platoon, according to the detected obstacle scenario. The main advantage of this scheme consists in the flexibility of the formation which can be on-line rearranged whenever large obstacle occurrences almost completely occlude the formation path and only narrow corridors are available.