Leader-Follower Formations on Real Terrestrial Robots

Abstract

Controlling robot formations represents one of the biggest open challenges for the Robotics Community. Its importance is remarked in a wide range of applications from truck platooning to autonomous robot-based parcel delivery. In this paper we propose a lightweight decentralized solution for controlling a queue shaped leader-follower turtlebot formation. In order to test our implementation, we perform tests both in simulation and on real turtlebots1. The complexity of the challenge we are tackling further increases due the fact that the robots we use to evaluate our work are non-holonomic, meaning they have limited controllable degrees of freedom.