A modular architecture for formation control

We present a four layer architecture for coordinating a team of mobile robots equipped with range sensors and wireless network cards, and the task of navigating to a desired location in a desired formation. We develop graph-based algorithms for discovery, and cooperative control. Discovery involves the use of sensory information to organize the robots into a mobile network allowing each robot to establish its neighbors and, when necessary, one or more leaders. Cooperative control is the task of achieving a desired formation shape and maintaining it. In addition, we integrate a modular adaptive controller into our framework to explicitly deal with the unknown dynamics of the vehicles in formation. Numerical simulations illustrate the application of these ideas and demonstrate the scalability of the proposed architecture for a large group of robots.