Decentralized Predictive Formation Control for Mobile Robots without Communication

Mobile robot formation control is one of the most important problems in multi-robot systems. A very challenging sub-problem is mobile robot platooning, which means that the mobile robots should follow each other and should maintain a safe distance between them. In order to avoid collisions in the platoon, the controllers have to be designed to ensure string stability, i.e., the spacing errors should not get amplified as they propagate upstream from robot to robot. This paper investigates two different decentralized model predictive control strategies for platoon guidance using only longitudinal changes for the mobile robots. Moreover, the simple solution for mobile robot platooning assumes that there is no communication between them and each mobile robot measures only the distance between itself and the one in front of it. Furthermore, several comparisons are made with classical proportional string stable controllers and a performance analysis is provided.