Similar Formation Control via Range and Odometry Measurements

摘要

This article investigates the similar formation control problem for multirobot systems. Specifically, we propose an integrated relative localization and similar formation control scheme to navigate multirobot systems to a desired configuration, which is a similar transformation of a given template, based on interrobot and robot-landmark range measurements and odometry measurements of robots themselves. To achieve the exact relative localization, a persistent excitation (P.E.) signal is introduced in the controller which, however, perturbs the motion of each robot and affects the formation accuracy. To resolve the conflict, an autonomous system with its output regulated by a carefully designed function of range measurements is introduced to generate the persistent excitation. It is proved that the similar formation control problem can be solved by our proposed scheme with global asymptotic convergence for directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Both numerical simulation and physical experiment are presented to verify and validate the effectiveness of our theoretical findings.