Flexible bearing-only rendezvous control of mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper we study rendezvous control of multiple mobile robots. We propose a control law that merely requires each robot to measure the relative bearings of their neighbors in their local coordinate frames. Distance measurement or relative position estimation is not required. In theory, the proposed control law verifies that distance information is redundant in rendezvous control tasks though the objective of rendezvous is to decrease the inter-robot distances. In practice, the control law provides a simple solution to vision-based rendezvous tasks where bearings can be measured by visual sensing. Moreover, we generalize the proposed control law by introducing an additional heading vector into the control law. This heading vector may preserve the system convergence and, in the meantime, provides great flexibility to adapt the control law for nonholonomic robot models or obstacle avoidance.