Robust Distributed Planar Formation Control for Higher-Order Holonomic and Nonholonomic Agents
Channel: Kaveh Fathian
Date: 2018-07-12

We present a distributed formation control strategy for agents with a variety of dynamics to achieve a desired planar formation. The proposed strategy is fully distributed, does not require inter-agent communication or a common sense of orientation, and can be implemented using relative position measurements acquired by agents in their local coordinate frames. We show how the control designed for agents with the simplest dynamical model, i.e., the single-integrator dynamics, can be extended to holonomic agents with higher-order dynamics such as quadrotors, and nonholonomic agents such as unicycles and cars. We  demonstrate the proposed approach in simulations and further present a distributed robotic platform to test the strategy experimentally. Our experimental platform consists of off-the-shelf equipment that can be used to test and validate other multi-agent algorithms. The code and implementation instructions for this platform are available online and free.

Kaveh Fathian, Sleiman Safaoui, Tyler Summers, Nicholas Gans
University of Texas at Dallas, USA.

Email: kavehfathian@gmail.com,  kaveh.fathian@utdallas.edu

Sphero robotic platform: https://github.com/TSummersLab/SRP_matlab

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/kavehfathian