Distributed Multi-Robot Formation Control Based on Bipartite Consensus With Time-Varying Delays

Abstract

A distributed formation control scheme of multi-robot systems for bipartite consensus under communication delays is presented in this paper. The bipartite consensus protocol under communication delays is first proposed. Under the bipartite consensus protocol, a necessary and sufficient condition is then presented for achieving bipartite consensus of the multi-agent system without time-delays. For the system with time-delays, a sufficient condition to asymptotically achieve the bipartite consensus is proposed. Furthermore, a universal multi-robot formation control protocol with communication delays is put forward according to the given bipartite consensus protocol. As an example, the bipartite consensus protocol under communication delays is applied to multi-robot formation control. Finally, a number of simulations are proposed to demonstrate the theoretical contributions of this work.