Experiments on formation switching for mobile robots

In this paper, we address the problem of distributed role assignment for multiple mobile robots. This problem arises when a mobile robot in the team must decide what role to take on in a desired formation configuration. In some applications, in which the center and the orientation of a desired formation are not predetermined, the rotation and translation of the formation can be computed by using average consensus protocols. However, a conflict arises when the same role is assigned to more than one robot. This problem is resolved by using a negotiation strategy, while each assigned robot is traveling to the target position. We evaluate our proposed framework through two experiments on a team of physical nonholonomic mobile robots, i.e., (i) robots reconfigure themselves from one formation to another, and (ii) formation switching happens, while each robot is following a reference path.