A Failure-Tolerant Approach to Synchronous Formation Control of Mobile Robots Under Communication Delays

Abstract

Robot malfunction is inevitable in practical applications of the robot formation control due to uncontrolled crashing, system malfunction or communication loss. In this paper, we study the synchronous formation control problem in the presence of robot malfunctions. Our main idea is to improve the network connectivity and motion synchronism of the robot formation through a series of topology switchings and robot replacements. Firstly, the synchronous formation control method is introduced which enables the robots to tracking their desired trajectories while keeping predefined formation shapes. Secondly, a recursive switched topology control strategy is proposed to restore the formation shape as well as to improve the network connectivity and motion synchronism in the presence of robot malfunctions. Thirdly, the convergence analysis of the proposed control system is presented and a sufficient condition is obtained under an average dwell time scheme. What's more, the proposed approach is fully distributed and the communication delays between neighboring robots also have been taken into consideration. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.