Detection of multi-active markers and pose for formation control

This paper represents a part of outdoor localization method based on relative information: heading angle and distance to apply to formation control for multi-agent robots. Well known are the researches about formation control for multi-agent robots using various sensors: window GPSs, ultra-sonic sensors and a camera with color markers, but those methods mostly could be applied on special environment and have restrictions or much expensive. The proposed method would be expected to overcome those problems. To avoid electronic or natural illumination disturbance in the image-processing, we used active markers (four bright LED arrays) and considered only their ON/OFF time period to obtain the pose. In this paper, experimental results will show that the algorithm is possible to be applied.