Descentralized control of leader-follower formations of mobile robots with obstacle avoidance

ALEXANDRE S. BRANDAO; MARIO SARCINELLI; RICARDO CARELLI; TEODIANO FREIRE

Málaga, España

Conferencia; IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics, ICM 2009; 2009

IEEE

This paper proposes a decentralized control scheme to guide a leader-follower formation of unicycle-like mobile robots to pass between static obs- tacles, demanding just one controller per robot. Two approaches are discussed, in terms of obstacle avoi- dance. One considers the whole formation as a virtual robot, which should avoid obstacles and keep the for- mation aspect. To do that, the leader robot takes care of goal seeking and obstacle avoidance, while the follower one just keeps the formation as a whole rigid body (rigid formation). In the second approach, the follower robot keeps only its separation from the leader (semi- rigid formation) and avoids obstacles, while the leader one seeks for the goal and avoids obstacles. In each case, the controllers onboard the robots do not share information during navigation (the control strategy is a decentralized one). Experimental results validating the proposal are also presented and discussed.