Cooperative Control of Multi-robot Systems with a Low-Degree Formation

The utilization of team of robots working in a cooperative manner has huge benefits in moving large payloads. To perform such tasks, a multi robot structure or formation is necessary to coordinate the motions of the robots in a well planned manner. In this paper, the formation control problem of multi car-like mobile robots have been studied. The purpose is to get a swarm of mobile robots in a certain formation pattern to track a desired trajectory to accomplish a set objective. A set of artificial potential field functions is proposed using the Direct Method of Lyapunov for avoiding inter-robot, inter-formation and obstacle collisions and attraction to their designated targets. The effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear acceleration control laws is demonstrated through computer simulation results which prove the efficiency of our control technique and also demonstrates scalability for a large group of robots.

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