REACT: Environment-Adaptive Architecture for Continuous Formation Navigation of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Engineering notes

REACT is highly suitable for applications in logistics, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue operations, where robots must operate in unpredictable settings. Implementation can lead to more efficient and safer robotic navigation in real-world scenarios.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

针对轮式移动机器人（WMR）的编队控制，现有研究多集中于跟踪预设编队，而缺乏对复杂现实环境的适应能力。本研究提出了REACT架构，通过集中式生成新环境适应编队和分布式维护形成，提升了WMR在障碍丰富和动态障碍环境中的连续导航能力。实验验证了该架构的有效性和实际应用潜力。

Original abstract

Formation control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) has been extensively studied due to its broad applications in fields such as logistics transportation, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue. However, most existing works mainly focus on tracking predefined formations, which limits their adaptability to complex real-world environments. To address this, we propose REACT (Real-time Environment-Adaptive architecture for Continuous formation navigaTion), a hierarchical architecture integrating centralized formation generation and distributed formation maintenance. Specifically, our upper layer generates new environment-adaptive formations when necessary and uses our proposed TCF-R2T (Trajectory-Conflict-Free Robot-to-Target assignment) algorithm to compute conflict-free WMR-to-target assignments in polynomial time, enabling timely formation transitions without trajectory conflicts. At the lower layer, each WMR executes our developed JSTP (Joint Spatio-Temporal trajectory Planning) method to maintain the generated formation by simultaneously optimizing spatial positions and temporal durations, thereby enhancing coordination among WMRs and enabling continuous navigation in obstacle-rich environments and dynamic-obstacle scenarios. Both simulation and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness and practical applicability of REACT. Experimental videos are available on our project website: https://dongjh20.github.io/REACT-website.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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