Distributed coordination architecture for multi-robot formation control

In the exploration and implementation of formation control strategies, communication range and bandwidth limitations form a barrier to large scale formation control applications. The limitations of current formation control strategies involving a leader–follower approach and a consensus-based approach with fully available group trajectory information are explored. A unified, distributed formation control architecture that accommodates an arbitrary number of group leaders and arbitrary information flow among vehicles is proposed. The architecture requires only local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange. In particular, an extended consensus algorithm is applied on the group level to estimate the time-varying group trajectory information in a distributed manner. Based on the estimated group trajectory information, a consensus-based distributed formation control strategy is then applied for vehicle level control. The proposed architecture is experimentally implemented and validated on a multi-robot platform under local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange with a single or multiple leaders involved.