Formation control of a swarm of mobile manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a new Lyapunov-based decentralized formation control planner for a swarm of 2-link mobile manipulators in an a priori known environment. To ensure a significant degree of formation stiffness along the flight-path, information on moving ghost targets, inter-robot bounds for aggregation and heading for the mobile manipulators are captured in the control planner. The final desired orientation of the formation is by observing a minimum distance between every member of the swarm and ghost walls. The nonlinear control laws extracted from the Lyapunov-based control scheme are utilized to obtain collision-free trajectories of the swarm in a low-degree formation, whilst ensuring stability of the kinodynamic system governing the swarm. The effectiveness of the controllers is demonstrated by simulating interesting situations.