Formation Control of Car-like Autonomous Vehicles under Communication Delay

The topic of this paper focuses on the development of formation controller for multiple car-like mobile robots. The studied robot formation is constructed under Leader-Follower approach, so that the follower robots are able to keep constant desired distances and relative bearing angles with respect to the leader. Affected by the data transmission delay between the leader and follower robots, the formation performance is degraded, which may even lead to undesired collision of the followers. A PD-type controller is proposed to compensate the delay effect, which is proved to be stable and effective in formation keeping. Some initial studies on parameter selection were also carried out. Both simulations and hardware experiments support the implementation of this type of controller, which also showed the capability of dealing with variable time delays in the communication channel.