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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dong, Jianghong, Zhang, Yifeng, Wang, Jiawei, Cai, Mengchi, Li, Keqiang, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Dong, Jianghong
Zhang, Yifeng
Wang, Jiawei
Cai, Mengchi
Li, Keqiang
Sartoretti, Guillaume
author_facet Dong, Jianghong
Zhang, Yifeng
Wang, Jiawei
Cai, Mengchi
Li, Keqiang
Sartoretti, Guillaume
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18441
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle REACT: Environment-Adaptive Architecture for Continuous Formation Navigation of Wheeled Mobile Robots
Dong, Jianghong
Zhang, Yifeng
Wang, Jiawei
Cai, Mengchi
Li, Keqiang
Sartoretti, Guillaume
Robotics
Systems and Control
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.
title REACT: Environment-Adaptive Architecture for Continuous Formation Navigation of Wheeled Mobile Robots
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18441