Abstract
Inspired by the group activities of natural swarms (e.g., a flock of birds, a colony of ants, etc.), a fleet of mobile robots can be collaboratively put into work to accomplish complex real-world tasks. Depending on the nature and complexity of a problem, a multi-robot system (MRS) may need to be decomposed into several subgroups. This paper proposes a unified group coordinated control scheme for networked MRSs having multiple targets. A `discontinuous' cooperative control law is first developed for a networked MRS to achieve individual sub-formations surrounding the assigned targets. A `continuous' cooperative control protocol is then proposed to overcome the chattering phenomenon often caused by a discontinuous control action during hardware implementation. The closed-loop stability of the overall networked MRS is guaranteed via the Lyapunov theory and boundary-layer techniques. Finally, two hardware experiments (target-enclosing and object transportation) involving real mobile robots have been carried out to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme.
Highlights
Distributed cooperative control of multi-robot systems (MRSs) has established its worth in both theories and practice over the past two decades [1]
This paper proposes a unified group coordinated control scheme for networked MRSs having multiple targets
In [5], the formation control problem for a group of nonholonomic mobile robots was addressed considering the communication time-delays. [6] proposed an extended state observer-based distributed model predictive control approach to deal with the multi-robot formation control problem in the presence of unknown disturbances
Summary
Distributed cooperative control of multi-robot systems (MRSs) has established its worth in both theories and practice over the past two decades [1]. In some multi-robot applications (e.g. multi-target pursuit and target-enclosing mission), a team of robots may need to be split into several subgroups ( known as ‘clusters’) surrounding each target, depending on the positions of the targets and the complexity of the task [10]. In such cases, the analysis and design of the coordinated control strategies become more challenging as the inter-group conflicts cause significant difficulties. A couple of hardware experiments involving real mobile robots have been conducted to test the feasibility of the proposed GCC scheme. It is explained that the leaderfollowing consensus-seeking problem, the formation tracking problem and the cluster control problem can all be considered as special cases of the proposed GCC framework
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