Multi-Robot Formation Control And Implementation

This paper develops a distributed method for formation control of ground mobile robots via partial differential equations (PDEs)-based approach. The collective dynamics of a group of mobile robots is modeled by a reaction-advection-diffusion PDE. Based the model, we design a boundary control by using of the PDE backstepping method, which results in the leader-actuating formation control scheme with the leader robots locate on the boundary. In the control scheme, each follower robot only needs to obtain its own position and the relative position to its neighbors, which reduce the cost of the followers. We verify the effectiveness of the control scheme through the mobile robots experiment. In the experiment, we use LinkTrack UWB module to realize the positioning function adding the Kalman filter algorithm to improve the positioning accuracy and we use MPC to realize the movement control of the car's forward speed, lateral speed and angle.