Practical Formation Control for Multiple Anonymous Robots System with Unknown Nonlinear Disturbances

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates formation control problems for a group of anonymous mobile robots with unknown nonlinear disturbances on a plane, in which all robots can asymptotically converge to any formation patterns without collision, and maintain any required relative distance with neighboring robots. To solve this problem, all robots are modeled as kinematic points and can only acquire information from other robots and their targets. Furthermore, a flexible distributed control law is designed to solve the formation problem while no collisions between any robots can be guaranteed during the whole process. The outstanding feature of the proposed control method is that it can force all mobile robots to form not only uniform circle formations but also non-uniform and non-circular formations with moving target centers. At last, both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show the feasibility of the proposed control law.