Semi-autonomous formation control of a single-master multi-slave teleoperation system

The primary objective of this paper is to develop an adaptive formation control method for a team of mobile robotic agents, which implements formation control, obstacle avoidance, and operator induced error compensation for unconstrained motions. In this approach, a leader robot is selected and teleoperated by an operator and the follower robots are autonomously coordinated to make a formation to perform a variety of tasks such as searching and/or pursuing targets, reconnaissance, etc. The formation can be reconfigured to avoid collisions with stationary obstacles and among the member robots. The performance of the developed method was investigated through haptic simulations and experiments. In the simulation study, a haptic device was used as the master robot, and three virtual nonholonomic mobile platforms were employed. The developed method was implemented on two differentially driven Pioneer-AT platforms. Both studies demonstrated consistent performance of the semi-autonomous formation control method in the presence of time-varying communication delays, erroneous operator commands, and stationary obstacles.