  Coordinated motion control in swarm robotics aims to ensure the coherence of
members in space, i.e., the robots in a swarm perform coordinated movements to
maintain spatial structures. This problem can be modeled as a tracking control
problem, in which individuals in the swarm follow a target position with the
consideration of specific relative distance or orientations. To keep the
communication cost low, the PID controller can be utilized to achieve the
leader-follower tracking control task without the information of leader
velocities. However, the controller's parameters need to be optimized to adapt
to situations changing, such as the different swarm population, the changing of
the target to be followed, and the anti-collision demands, etc. In this letter,
we apply a modified Brain Storm Optimization (BSO) algorithm to an incremental
PID tracking controller to get the relatively optimal parameters adaptively for
leader-follower formation control for swarm robotics. Simulation results show
that the proposed method could reach the optimal parameters during robot
movements. The flexibility and scalability are also validated, which ensures
that the proposed method can adapt to different situations and be a good
candidate for coordinated motion control for swarm robotics in more realistic
scenarios.

Robotics