Distributed Formation and Orientation Control of Multiple Holonomic Mobile Robots using Relative Measurements

This paper studies distributed formation and orientation control of multiple robots using relative measurements in local coordinate frames. The control objective is to achieve a desired formation with all robots facing a target for monitoring. It is assumed that each robot can only measure neighbors' relative positions to the target and relative orientations to their neighbors, and that communication among robots is unavailable. To address this issue, we introduce a unified framework of formation and orientation control, and proposed a distributed and relative control law to ensure achieving the control objective. Not only formation but also orientation control is successful because a clique-based method is employed, instead of conventional edge-based ones. Here, the cliques are complete subgraphs. Besides, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through a simulation, and the stability of the system is analyzed. Because this method is applicable regardless of the dimension of the space, the proposed method can be applied to both UGV and UAV, as well as the coordination of heterogeneous multi-robot systems in the case of cooperative monitoring and transport.