Demonstration for REACT

REACT: Real-time Environment-Adaptive architecture for Continuous formation navigaTion.

Jianghong Dong1, Yifeng Zhang2, Jiawei Wang3, Mengchi Cai1, Keqiang Li1, Guillaume Sartoretti2
1Tsinghua University, 2National University of Singapore, 3University of Michigan

Real-World Experiments

1. Formation Convergence

Results & Metrics click

Click to view quantitative evaluation results including formation error metrics and speed profiles. For the correspondence between WMR indices in the video above and those in the figures, see the WMR-Index tab.

Formation Error Metric

2.1 Obstacle Avoidance: Inside

Results & Metrics click

Click to view quantitative evaluation results including formation error metrics and lateral position (WMR 2 and WMR 3, whose y-trajectories change for obstacle avoidance). For the correspondence between WMR indices in the video above and those in the figures, see the WMR-Index tab.

Formation Error Metric

2.2 Obstacle Avoidance: Outside

Results & Metrics click

Click to view quantitative evaluation results including formation error metrics and lateral position (WMR 2 and WMR 3, whose y-trajectories change for obstacle avoidance). For the correspondence between WMR indices in the video above and those in the figures, see the WMR-Index tab.

Formation Error Metric

2.3 Obstacle Avoidance: Dynamic

Results & Metrics click

Click to view quantitative evaluation results including formation error metrics and lateral position (WMR 2 and WMR 3, whose y-trajectories change for obstacle avoidance), as well as the view from the motion capture system. For the correspondence between WMR indices in the video above and those in the figures, see the WMR-Index tab.

Formation Error Metric

3. Formation Transition

Results & Metrics click

Click to view quantitative evaluation results including formation error metrics and lateral position. For the correspondence between WMR indices in the video above and those in the figures, see the WMR-Index tab.

Formation Error Metric

Simulation

1. Formation Navigation in Obstacle-Rich Environments

2. Continuous Formation Navigation

Abstract

Formation control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) has been extensively studied due to its broad applications in fields such as logistics transportation and resource exploration. However, 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, the upper layer generates new environment-adaptive formations when necessary and uses the 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 the 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. Simulation and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness and practical applicability of REACT. Experimental videos are available at our project website.