Formation control and collision avoidance of unicycle robots with distributed predictive control

Abstract

In this paper we focus on formation control of a fleet of small-size unicycle vehicles with a distributed control scheme.We propose an approach based on a multi-level distributed predictive control (DPC) scheme, which also provides inter-robot and obstacle collision avoidance guarantees and, at the same time, requires the solution to a quadratic optimization problem, involving a limited computational burden. A real application example is illustrated, showing the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.