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To guide a robotic swarm in a cluttered environment, a curve virtual tube is designed in this paper. There is no obstacle within the curve virtual tube, and the area inside can be seen as a safety zone. Then, a distributed swarm controller is proposed with three elaborate control terms. Formal analyses and proofs show that the curve virtual tube passing-through control problem can be solved in a finite time. For convenience in practical use, a modified controller with an approximate control performance is put forward. Some control laws for different types of robots to track their vector fields are also presented. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulations and real experiments. To show the advantages of the proposed method, the comparisons between our method and other methods are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To navigate and control a single mobile robot or a robotic swarm with higher efficiency, a novel non-potential orthogonal vector field method is proposed in this paper, which is modified from the traditional artificial potential field method. The improvement strategy aims at making the overall repulsive vector field orthogonal to the attractive vector field in some conditions. And the same potential field function is still applied to the Lyapunov-based stability analysis. In short, such an improvement strategy combines the advantages of the artificial potential field method with the non-potential vector field method, namely a combination of theoretical completeness and control efficiency. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated both by numerical simulations with statistical significance and real experiments. The comparisons between our method and other methods are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]