Decentralized formation control of autonomous mobile robots

Control of vehicle formations is an area of great interest that requires knowhow from several scientific areas such as control theory, vision, communication system, etc. In this work, several approaches to maintain a formation of vehicles are explained and tested. In this paper, the approach towards formation control is achieved through position based visual servoing (PBVS). In PBVS, a cartesian space controller is used for target tracking. Two 2D pose estimation methods are described and two local controllers developed (discrete linear quadratic regulator and an explicit model predictive controller). To maintain the mobile robots in formation, a neighbor referenced (NR) control scheme is used. NR-based control allows decentralized formation control schemes since each member of the formation only has information of its neighbors and not of the entire robots in the formation. Finally, simulation and experimental results of the developed work are presented.