Towards a reliable vision-based mobile robot formation control

In this article, a robot formation control strategy based on a vision-based follow-the-leader scenario is proposed, with emphasize on its reliability. On the one hand, perception is enhanced by the control of a motorized zoom. On the other hand, bidirectional and non-oblivious (Suzuki, I and Yamashita, M, 1996) control is implemented, with an odometry-based fault detection of vision-based information and a leader path-planning strategy to improve its visibility. After introduction of the control strategy, extensive experimental results are presented.