Application of Distributed Linear Multi-Agent Containment Control to Robotic Systems

Abstract

This article proposes the application of a distributed containment control algorithm to a team of mobile robots. This paper builds on the containment controller developed by Yuan et al. (2019) for generic linear multi-agent system and tested in simulation only. In this article, we particularize the controller for the case of multiple mobile robots by including it into a two-layer control scheme. The high-level controller computes a desired position for the mobile robots, that is then used as reference trajectory for the low-level controller. The resulting control system is implemented as a fully distributed system on a team of mobile robots and validated in simulations and experiments.