Abstract:
In a variety of tasks performed in construction sites, coordinated operations of multi-vehicles are
foreshadowed to outperform the deployment of a single vehicle in terms of increased capacity and flexibility. This
paper presents the application of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in deriving drive commands,
speed and turning, for the vehicles such that they are steered into and maintained in desirable formations
according to an assigned task. The PSO is adopted for its implementation simplicity and relaxing the need for
analytical system models. To this end, the coordination of vehicles is posed as an optimization problem
minimizing the translational and angular errors between the current vehicle positions and their corresponding
targets. Inter-vehicle collisions are mitigated, in this work, by employing a behavioural-based reactive scheme
together with a dynamical index rescheduling procedure. Simulation results for coordinated multi-vehicle
motions, in benchmark formation patterns, are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
