Steady formation analysis on multi-robot systems

Abstract

In this paper, a controller is designed for a group of cooperative robots to achieve the stable displacements. Communication network among the robots is assumed unavailable and each robot can only measure the displacements relative to their neighbours. The controller will enable the robots to move to a predefined formation or a special formation under a suitable protocol which we will design. We will discuss the effect of different sizes of the multi-vehicle system and conduct simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller and the formation protocols.

Keywords:

• Formation control
• limited sensing range
• controller design
• size of multi-vehicle system

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Prof Changyun Wen, the handling associate editor and reviewers for their very constructive comments and suggestions which have greatly helped us to improve the presentation of the paper.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP140102180], [grant number LP140100471]; the China Scholarship Council.