Social Potentials for Scalable Multi-Robot Formations

Potential function approaches to robot navigation pro vide an elegant paradigm for expressing multiple con straints and goals in mobile robot navigation problems As an example a simple reactive navigation strat egy can be generated by combining repulsion from ob stacles with attraction to a goal Advantages of this approach can also be extended to multi robot teams In this paper we present a new class of potential functions for multiple robots that enables homogeneous large scale robot teams to arrange themselves in geometric formations while navigating to a goal location through an obstacle eld The approach is inspired by the way molecules snap into place as they form crystals the robots are drawn to particular attachment sites po sitioned with respect to other robots We refer to these potential functions as social potentials because they are constructed with respect to other agents Initial results generated in simulation illustrate the viability of the approach