Vision based leader-follower formation control for mobile robots

Abstract

Creating systems with multiple autonomous vehicles places severe demands on the design of control schemes. Robot formation control plays a vital role in coordinating robots. As the number of members in a system rise, the complexity of each member increases. There is a proportional increase in the quantity and complexity of onboard sensing, control and computation. This thesis investigates the control of a group of mobile robots consisting of a leader and several followers to maintain a desired geometric formation. The group considered has several inexpensive sensor-limited and computationally limited robots that follow a leader robot in a desired formation over long distances. This situation is similar to a search, demining, or planetary exploration situation in which several deployable/disposable robots are led by a more sophisticated leader. Complex sensing and computation are performed by the leader, while the followers perform simple operations under the leader’s guidance. The architecture consists of two main components: (i) a model-based vision system and (ii) a control algorithm. The model-based vision system can recognize and relatively localize the