A Decentralized Heterogeneous Control Strategy for a Class of Infinitesimally Shape-Similar Formations

The sensing modalities available to individual agents in a multi-robot team have a significant effect on what the team can accomplish. Previous work on infinitesimal shape-similarity has shown that maintaining relative angles between robots equipped with bearing-only sensors can render a formation of these robots invariant to translation, rotation, and uniform scaling; however, previous work has not proposed decentralized control strategies for exploiting this invariance. To address this deficiency, this paper proposes a decentralized formation control strategy for assembled triangulations, a class of infinitesimally shape-similar formations. Heterogeneous in terms of sensing and control, a decentralized formation control strategy is developed in which one robot sets the position of the formation, a robot capable of measuring bearings and distances controls the scale and heading, and the remaining robots maintain the assembled triangulation. The asymptotic controllers that compose the formation control strategy of this work are implemented on a team of differential-drive robots.