Adaptive Formation Control for Collaborative Swarm Robots

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive formation control framework for the control of swarm robots working in collaboration in dynamic environments, including both free spaces and constrained corridors. The proposed framework for the control of swarm robots consists of the adoption of the leader follower paradigm, where the leader performs the tasks of global navigation and formation control, while the followers make use of the states communicated among themselves for the control of local tracking. In order to make the swarm robots environment aware, the swarm robots dynamically switch between the TRIANGLE formation pattern and the LINE formation pattern using the corridor detection mechanism based on the finite state machine with hysteresis. The major contribution of this paper is the development of the formation aware fuzzy logic based ACC mechanism for the control of inter robot distances during the execution of the close following task. Unlike the conventional ACC mechanism, the fuzzy logic based ACC mechanism does not lead to the oscillatory 'stop and go' problem, thus enhancing the smoothness of the motion of the swarm robots. The simulation results obtained using the Webots simulation environment for the control of the swarm robots, where the swarm consists of four robots, validate the efficacy of the control mechanism, where the swarm robots adapt their formation based on the corridor constraints, thus maintaining the integrity of the formation while keeping the inter-robot distances safe. The fuzzy logic based ACC mechanism also improves the smoothness of the velocities of the swarm robots relative to the conventional ACC mechanism. © 2026 IEEE.