Experiments in Consensus-based Distributed Cooperative Control of Multiple Mobile Robots

Abstract

Distributed cooperative control strategies account for communication range and bandwidth limitations. While various distributed cooperative control strategies have been studied in theory, few of them have been systematically validated on experimental platforms. This paper demonstrates experimental results of consensus-based distributed cooperative control strategies on a multiple wheeled mobile robot platform. We first introduce our distributed cooperative control experimental platform including both hardware and software architectures. We then experimentally implement and validate a consensus-based distributed attitude alignment algorithm with multiple robots. We finally experimentally implement and validate a consensus-based distributed formation control algorithm in the cases of switching group leaders and robot elimination. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our platform and the consensus-based distributed cooperative control strategies.