Leaderless Cooperative Formation Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots Under Limited Communication Range Constraints

In this paper, a new leaderless cooperative formation control strategy is proposed for a group of autonomous mobile robots. Through the local state and input transformations, the formation control problem can be recast as the cooperative control design problem for a class of general canonical systems with arbitrary but finite relative degree. A set of less-restrictive sufficient conditions on group communication topology to ensure the success of cooperative control design has been established. The system stability is rigorously proved by studying the convergence of products of row stochastic matrices. The proposed design does not require either that collaborative robots have a fixed communication/control structure (such as leader/follower or nearest neighbor) or that their sensor/communication graph be strongly connected. Detailed simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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