Position and Orientation Based Formation Control of Multiple Rigid Bodies with Collision Avoidance and Connectivity Maintenance
It addresses the practical challenge of formation control for multi-agent systems with limited sensing and safety constraints, but the results are simulation-based and incremental.
This paper presents a decentralized control protocol for formation control of multiple rigid bodies in 3D with obstacles, ensuring connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance using local information and a novel class of potential functions, validated through simulations.
This paper addresses the problem of position- and orientation-based formation control of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in a $3$D workspace with obstacles. More specifically, we design a decentralized control protocol such that each agent achieves a predefined geometric formation with its initial neighbors, while using local information based on a limited sensing radius. The latter implies that the proposed scheme guarantees that the initially connected agents remain always connected. In addition, by introducing certain distance constraints, we guarantee inter-agent collision avoidance as well as collision avoidance with the obstacles and the boundary of the workspace. The proposed controllers employ a novel class of potential functions and do not require a priori knowledge of the dynamical model, except for gravity-related terms. Finally, simulation results verify the validity of the proposed framework.