DISTRIBUTED CONTROL FOR GENERATING ARBITRARY FORMATION OF MULTIPLE ROBOTS

To generate arbitrary shape cooperatively and determine formation-vectors autonomously for multiple mobile robots when multiple mobile robot are to achieve a common task, an autonomous formation vector determination method is first proposed for every agent. Then formation-vector based control algorithm is extended theoretically as so to generate a sort of given arbitrary formation shape and robot motion strategy is improved to reduce convergence time. A quick converging distributed algorithm for generating arbitrary shape of multiple mobile robots is proposed. To prevent the robot from collision, a communication model is presented. The simulation results and the real robot experiments show the feasibility and validity of the algorithm proposed in this paper.