Reconfigurable Formation Control of Multi-Agents Using Virtual Linkage Approach

Formation control is an important problem in cooperative robotics due to its broad applications. To address this problem, the concept of a virtual linkage is introduced. Using this idea, a group of robots is designed and controlled to behave as particles embedded in a mechanical linkage instead of as a single rigid body as with the virtual structure approach. As compared to the virtual structure approach, the method proposed here can reconfigure the group of robots into different formation patterns by coordinating the joint angles in the corresponding mechanical linkage. Meanwhile, there is no need to transmit all the robots' state information to a single location and implement all of the computation on it, due to virtual linkage's hierarchical architecture. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using two simulations with nine robots: moving around a circle in line formation, and moving through a gallery with varying formation patterns.