Experiences of formation control of multi-robot systems with the Null-Space-based Behavioral Control

In this paper, two experimental case studies performed with a multi-robot system made of 6 Khepera II mobile robots are presented. The experiments, performed at the laboratory LAI (Laboratorio di Automazione Industriale) of the Universita degli Studi di Cassino, are aimed at testing the performances and the robustness of a behavior-based technique, namely the null-space-based behavioral control (NSB), while executing different kinds of missions. In particular, the NSB approach, based on an inverse kinematic technique inherited by industrial manipulator applications, has been developed to control a generic team of autonomous vehicles and it has been implemented on a centralized architecture to control, at a kinematic level, a platoon of autonomous mobile robots.