An Improved Multi-robot Distributed Formation Tracking Control Based on Sensor Self-calibration: System Design and Experimental Study

Abstract

In recent years, the research on formation control of multi-robot has become a hot topic. Most of methods are dependent on external positioning equipment, such as optical motion capture system. An improved distributed multi-robot formation tracking control is proposed in this paper. A distance-based approach is given, where lidars are self-calibrated to eliminate the effect of measurement inconsistencies. A robot with global positioning is set as the multi-robot leader to observe and control the formation pose and movement. A trajectory tracking controller is designed based on Lyapunov theory. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate prescribed formations and track target trajectories accurately using global pose information of only one robot.