Arbitrarily shaped formations of mobile robots: artificial potential fields and coordinate transformation

作者：Sabattini Lorenzo^*; Secchi Cristian; Fantuzzi Cesare

来源：Autonomous Robots, 2011, 30(4): 385-397.

DOI：10.1007/s10514-011-9225-4

• Formation control
• Artificial potential fields
• Arbitrarily shaped formations
• Coordinate transformation

In this paper we describe a novel decentralized control strategy to realize formations of mobile robots. We first describe how to design artificial potential fields to obtain a formation with the shape of a regular polygon. We provide a formal proof of the asymptotic stability of the system, based on the definition of a proper Lyapunov function. We also prove that our control strategy is not affected by the problem of local minima. Then, we exploit a bijective coordinate transformation to deform the polygonal formation, thus obtaining a completely arbitrarily shaped formation. Simulations and experimental tests are provided to validate the control strategy.

• 出版日期2011-5