Leader-following formation control of multiple mobile vehicles

TLDR

The paper proposes a leader‑following framework to control autonomous mobile vehicles into predetermined formations. A three‑level hybrid architecture decomposes the global formation problem into pairwise follower‑leader control, employing two basic controllers for relative positioning and collision avoidance, and uses graph theory to define formation patterns with switching capabilities. Simulations and real‑world robot experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

A framework for controlling groups of autonomous mobile vehicles to achieve predetermined formations based on a leader-following approach is presented. A three-level hybrid control architecture is proposed to implement both centralised and decentralised cooperative control. Under such architecture, the global-level formation control problem of n vehicles is decomposed into decentralised control problems between n−1 pairs of follower and their designated leader. In the leader–follower control level, two basic controllers are proposed to make the following robot keep a relative position with respect to the leader and avoid collisions in the presence of obstacles. Then, graph theory is introduced to formalise specified formation patterns in a simple but effective way, and two types of switching between these formations are also proposed. Numerical simulations and physical robot experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.