Abstract
Aimed at the problem that experimental verifications are difficult to execute due to lacking effective experimental platforms in the research field of multi-robot formation, we design a simple multi-robot formation platform. This proposed general and low-cost multi-robot formation platform includes the indoor global-positioning system, the multi-robot communication system, and the wheeled mobile robot hardware. For each wheeled mobile robot in our platform, its real-time position information in the centimeter‑level precise is obtained by the Marvelmind Indoor Navigation System and orientation information is obtained by the six-degree-of-freedom gyroscope. The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) wireless communication infrastructure is selected to support the communication among robots and the data collection in the process of experiments. Finally, a set of leader–follower formation experiments are performed by our platform, which include three trajectory tracking experiments of different types and numbers under deterministic environment and a formation-maintaining experiment with external disturbances. The results illustrate that our multi-robot formation platform can be effectively used as a general testbed to evaluate and verify the feasibility and correctness of the theoretical methods in the multi-robot formation. What is more, the proposed simple and general formation platform is beneficial to the development of platforms in the fields of multi-robot coordination, formation control, and search and rescue missions.
Highlights
Multi-robot formation control is one of the most important areas of research in Multi-RobotSystems [1,2], due to general practical applications such as joint handing [3], cooperative rescue [4], group stalking, and exploration [5]
The positioning system is the basis of a multi-robot formation experimental platform, which determines the position and orientation of robots in real time
The formation of wheeled mobile robots is selected as the research object, and we propose a general and low-cost multi-robot formation experimental platform to facilitate the application validation of theories and methods on the multi-robot formation research
Summary
Multi-robot formation control is one of the most important areas of research in Multi-Robot. The positioning system is the basis of a multi-robot formation experimental platform, which determines the position and orientation of robots in real time. To reduce the cost, choosing some economical positioning technologies to replace vision systems is urgently required Technologies such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) [18], Ultra-Wideband (UWB) [19], and Bluetooth [10] are not suitable to be employed for multi-robot formation due to low precision. Technology is relatively low cost, its use for wireless control of multi-robot systems has become a practical proposition [28]. The formation of wheeled mobile robots is selected as the research object, and we propose a general and low-cost multi-robot formation experimental platform to facilitate the application validation of theories and methods on the multi-robot formation research.
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