Probability-triggered formation control with adaptive roles

Abstract

Formation control for a team of robots is investigated in this paper. We consider the case where no communication channels are available. Only sensors with limited ranges can provide the robots with the relative displacements to nearby robots. The robots themselves are fully independent with exchangeable positions in the predefined formations. Thus the robot team is distributed both physically and in their information flow. To deal with the lack of communication, a distributed control strategy is proposed to drive the robots to a potentially flawed formation. Then, a coordination protocol is presented to detect the imperfections such that the locally desired formations are transformed into a globally desired formation. An evaluation method is given to impose a weak restriction on the predefined formation, rendering it almost arbitrary. The minimal local topology is proposed to enhance the robustness. The coordination protocol is then modified by introducing probability to reduce the computation burden and avoid the infinite trajectory loop.