  To guide the movement of a robotic swarm in a corridor-like environment, a
curve virtual tube with no obstacle inside is designed in our previous work.
This paper generalizes the controller design to the condition that all robots
have self-localization drifts and precise relative navigation, where the
flocking algorithm is introduced to reduce the negative impact of the
self-localization drift. It is shown that the cohesion behavior and the
velocity alignment behavior are able to reduce the influence of the position
measurement drift and the velocity measurement error, respectively. For the
convenience in practical use, a modified vector field controller with five
control terms is put forward. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method
is validated by numerical simulations and real experiments.

Robotics