Angle-Constrained Formation Control for Circular Mobile Robots
This work addresses formation control for circular robots in robotics, offering a practical solution with low-cost sensors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gradient-based methods.
The paper tackled the formation control problem for disk-shaped mobile robots using interior angle measurements from vision sensors, proposing a gradient-based distributed control law that ensures exponential convergence and collision avoidance, demonstrated with simulations of four robots forming a rectangular shape.
In this letter, we investigate the formation control problem of mobile robots moving in the plane where, instead of assuming robots to be simple points, each robot is assumed to have the form of a disk with equal radius. Based on interior angle measurements of the neighboring robots' disk, which can be obtained from low-cost vision sensors, we propose a gradient-based distributed control law and show the exponential convergence property of the associated error system. By construction, the proposed control law has the appealing property of ensuring collision avoidance between neighboring robots. We also present simulation results for {a team} of four circular mobile robots forming a rectangular shape.