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A switched-system approach to formation control and heading consensus for multi-robot systems

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel, hybrid and decentralized, switched-system approach for formation and heading consensus control of mobile robots under switching communication topology, including collision avoidance capability. The set of robots consists of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots and can include a teleoperated UAV. The key feature of this approach is a virtual graph, which is derived by adding a set of relative translation vectors to the real graph of the multiple robots. Our approach results in the robots in the real graph moving to the desired formation and achieving heading consensus while the virtual robots on the virtual graph reach pose consensus. If any robot detects a nearby obstacle or other robot, the robot will temporarily move along an avoidance vector, which is perpendicular and positively projected onto the attractive vector, such that collision is avoided while minimally deviating from its formation control path. Experimental results are provided by two different research groups to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. These experiments extend the theoretical development by introducing a teleoperated quadrotor as a leader robot of the multi-robot systems. The same control law works for the extended system, with no modifications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Autonomous Vehicle Systems Engineering, General Motors, Mound Rd, Warren, MI, 48090, USA

    Jingfu Jin

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, 75080, USA

    Nicholas Gans

  3. Department of Electronics Engineering, University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico

    Juan-Pablo Ramirez

  4. Convergence Research Center for Wellness, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Daegu, 711-873, South Korea

    SungGil Wee, DongHa Lee & YoonGu Kim

Authors
  1. Jingfu Jin
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  2. Juan-Pablo Ramirez
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  3. SungGil Wee
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  4. DongHa Lee
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  5. YoonGu Kim
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  6. Nicholas Gans
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to YoonGu Kim or Nicholas Gans.

Additional information

This work was supported by the DGIST R&D Program of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Technology of Korea (15-BD-01).

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Jin, J., Ramirez, JP., Wee, S. et al. A switched-system approach to formation control and heading consensus for multi-robot systems. Intel Serv Robotics 11, 207–224 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-018-0246-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-018-0246-0

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