Formation control of arbitrary shape with no communication

Abstract

Formation control of a robot team is studied under the lack of communication channels. The robots are only equipped with displacement sensors of limited ranges. The robots are equally important and can access the objective formation in an arbitrary shape. In this paper, we present a protocol that has been designed to map the displacements from the sensors to those from the objective formation. With the available local mappings, each robot is driven by its controller to a partially desired local formation. The undesired conflicts among such local formations will trigger the protocol to produce re-mappings. Probability is used to avoid any infinite mapping loops.