Abstract
This paper presents a novel scheme for controlling planar multirobot formations. We assume the multirobot team’s overall motion is guided by a subset of independently moving leader robots. We propose a strategy to control the other robots, called followers, based on minimizing a distributed deformation cost. This cost is based on a team organization in triads, i.e., three-robot subsets. Our strategy allows the team to maintain a prescribed formation shape while maneuvering under the leaders’ guidance during, e.g., collaborative object transport or navigation tasks. We also study how to restrict the leaders’ dynamics to facilitate formation tracking by the followers under motion constraints. The control laws we propose are distributed, can be designed locally, and rely on relative position measurements only. We illustrate our scheme with simulations considering single-integrator and unicycle robot dynamics.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported via projects PID2021-124137OB-I00 and TED2021-130224B-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, by ERDF A way of making Europe and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR, via project REMAIN S1/1.1/E0111 (Interreg Sudoe Programme, ERDF), and via a María Zambrano fellowship funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and by the European Union-NextGenerationEU.
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Aranda, M., Aragüés, R., López-Nicolás, G. (2024). Shape Control of Maneuvering Planar Formations Based on Distributed Deformation Minimization. In: Marques, L., Santos, C., Lima, J.L., Tardioli, D., Ferre, M. (eds) Robot 2023: Sixth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 976. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58676-7_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58676-7_27
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