Abstract
There are many potential applications of swarm robotic systems in real-world scenarios. In this paper, formation-containment controller design for single-integrator and double-integrator swarm robotic systems with input saturation is investigated. The swarm system contains two types of robots—leaders and followers. A novel control protocol and an implementation algorithm are proposed that enable the leaders to achieve the desired formation via semidefinite programming (SDP) techniques. The followers then converge into the convex hull formed by the leaders simultaneously. In contrast to conventional consensus-based formation control methods, the relative formation reference signal is not required in the real-time data transmission, which provides greater feasibility for implementation on hardware platforms. The effectiveness of the proposed formation-containment control algorithm is demonstrated with both numerical simulations and experiments using real robots that utilize the miniature mobile robot, Mona.
Highlights
In recent years, research studies on swarm robotics have generated increasing attention from the robotics and control communities
Swarm robotics mainly focuses on coordination control mechanisms within a group of homogeneous or heterogeneous robots by following collective and decentralized decision-making approaches that are mainly inspired by nature [1]
There are many potential real-world applications for swarm robotic systems, such as object transportation [12, 13], autonomous shepherding [14], self-assembly [15], exploration of unknown environments [16, 17], agriculture [18, 19], and target surveillance [20, 21], all of which require carefully designed controllers, able to support limitations imposed by the physical environments
Summary
Research studies on swarm robotics have generated increasing attention from the robotics and control communities. Swarm robotics mainly focuses on coordination control mechanisms within a group of homogeneous or heterogeneous robots by following collective and decentralized decision-making approaches that are mainly inspired by nature [1]. There are many swarm behaviors such as collective motion and flocking [2,3,4,5], aggregation [6, 7], foraging [8, 9], exploration [10], and group transport [11], all of which have been successfully implemented using real mobile robots. A significant research direction in swarm robotics is formation control [22, 23], which explores how control systems can be designed to enable robots to converge to specific positions, allowing them to form the desired shape [24]. In [27], cooperative control of heterogeneous vehicle platoons using
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