Cooperative distributed nonlinear model predictive control of a formation of differentially-driven mobile robots

Abstract

Due to the increasing complexity of today’s tasks and the demand for higher performance and robustness, using a single robot is not always expedient in robotics applications. Therefore, having multiple autonomous robotic agents collaborate utilizing explicit communication is gaining more attention. The goal of this article is to develop a distributed algorithm that allows the formation control of multiple differentially-driven mobile robots. The formation control goal is formulated in a novel manner by leveraging results on the control of a single differentially-driven mobile robot, which is sophisticated due to the present non-holonomic constraint. This results in a nonlinear distributed control problem. The fundamental functionality of the developed algorithm is analyzed in simulation scenarios. The applicability to real-life scenarios is demonstrated through experiments with custom hardware. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that nonlinear distributed model predictive control is applied to a formation of differentially-driven mobile robots using a theoretically-founded cost function and, moreover, that the results are verified with hardware experiments.