Title
Distributed formation control without a global reference frame
Abstract
This paper presents a decentralized controller to drive a team of agents to reach a desired formation in the absence of a global reference frame. Each agent is able to measure its relative position and orientation with respect to its neighbors. The different orientations imply that the relative positions between pairs of agents are sensed differently for each agent. In order to reach the desired configuration, the agents use two simultaneous consensus controllers, one to control their relative orientations, and another for their relative positions. The convergence to the desired configuration is shown by comparing the system with time-varying orientations with the equivalent approach with fixed rotations, showing that their difference vanishes as time goes to infinity. While the analysis in the paper is performed in a 2-dimensional space with orientations belonging to SO(2), our approach can be extended to handle 3 dimensions and orientations in SO(3). Simulation results, as well as hardware experiments with two quadrotor UAVs, corroborate the theoretical findings of the paper.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ACC.2014.6859235
American Control Conference
Keywords
Field
DocType
decentralised control,distributed control,mobile robots,multi-robot systems,position control,decentralized controller,distributed formation control,quadrotor UAV,relative orientation control,relative position control,simultaneous consensus controllers,time-varying orientations,Agents-based systems,Cooperative control
Convergence (routing),Reference frame,Control theory,Computer science,Control theory,Infinity,Control engineering
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0743-1619
7
0.51
References 
Authors
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eduardo Montijano121422.27
Dingjiang Zhou2834.97
Mac Schwager393072.33
Carlos Sagüés444339.22