DISTRIBUTED CONTROL FOR GENERATING ARBITRARY FORMATION OF MULTIPLE ROBOTS

Abstract

To generate arbitrary shape cooperatively and determine formation vectors autonomously for multiple mobile robots when multiple mobile robot are to achieve a common task, an autonomous formation vector determination method is first proposed for every agent. Then formation vector based control algorithm is extended theoretically as so to generate a sort of given arbitrary formation shape and robot motion strategy is improved to reduce convergence time. A quick converging distributed algorithm for generating arbitrary shape of multiple mobile robots is proposed. To prevent the robot from collision, a communication model is presented. The simulation results and the real robot experiments show the feasibility and validity of the algorithm proposed in this paper.