Coordinated formation control for multi-robot systems with communication constraints

Abstract

Multi-robot formation control with communication constraints has been attracting more and more attentions because of its wide applications in many areas. The existing methods usually need to put some assumptions on the communication constraints, such as delay bounds. These assumptions cannot be always satisfied in real communication networks like the Internet. This paper proposes a non-time based coordination method for multi-robot formation control with random communication delays. Different from previous methods, a nontime reference is used and a perceptive coordination scheme is designed. The stability of the system is analyzed. Experiments were implemented on a multi-robot system to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.