Edge-weighted consensus-based formation control strategy with collision avoidance

Riccardo Falconi,Cesare Fantuzzi,Cristian Secchi,Lorenzo Sabattini,Claudio Melchiorri

doi:10.1017/s0263574714000368

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this paper, a consensus-based control strategy is presented to gather formation for a group of differential-wheeled robots. The formation shape and the avoidance of collisions between robots are obtained by exploiting the properties of weighted graphs. Since mobile robots are supposed to move in unknown environments, the presented approach to multi-robot coordination has been extended in order to include obstacle avoidance. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy has been demonstrated by means of analytical proofs. Moreover, results of simulations and experiments on real robots are provided for validation purposes.

Highlights

IntroductionThis paper introduces a decentralized control strategy to let a group of robots create a desired geometric formation by means of local interaction with neighboring robots.The idea of studying algorithms to let a group of mobile agents perform formation control has been directly inspired by the behavior of social animals,[1,2] where local interactions between agents and simple behavioral control exploited by each of them drives to a complex behavior for the entire system, such as in the case of school of fish or birds flocking.The emergence of complex social behaviors leads to the study of more formalized forms of interactions between agents.[3,4,5,6] In particular, it drove the attention to the study of algorithms able to ensure that agents can achieve and preserve a predefined formation, even in the presence of environmental constraints
The idea of studying algorithms to let a group of mobile agents perform formation control has been directly inspired by the behavior of social animals,[1,2] where local interactions between agents and simple behavioral control exploited by each of them drives to a complex behavior for the entire system, such as in the case of school of fish or birds flocking
The communication range was set to R = 0.3 m: each robot was allowed to exchange data only with its neighbors, that is, robots whose distance was less than R

Summary

Introduction

This paper introduces a decentralized control strategy to let a group of robots create a desired geometric formation by means of local interaction with neighboring robots.The idea of studying algorithms to let a group of mobile agents perform formation control has been directly inspired by the behavior of social animals,[1,2] where local interactions between agents and simple behavioral control exploited by each of them drives to a complex behavior for the entire system, such as in the case of school of fish or birds flocking.The emergence of complex social behaviors leads to the study of more formalized forms of interactions between agents.[3,4,5,6] In particular, it drove the attention to the study of algorithms able to ensure that agents can achieve and preserve a predefined formation, even in the presence of environmental constraints. This paper introduces a decentralized control strategy to let a group of robots create a desired geometric formation by means of local interaction with neighboring robots. The consensus problem[23] is a well-known and widely studied problem in the field of decentralized control. It starts from considering all the agents as holonomic kinematic models: xi = ui, (3). XN ]T , and wij (x) are positive edge weight functions. It is worth noting that the edge weights wij used in this approach are only function of xi and xj , implementing a fully decentralized algorithm.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion