Following the flock [formation control]

Author

Vidal, René ; Shakernia, Omid ; Sastry, Shankar

Author_Institution

Center for Imaging Sci., Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD, USA

Volume

11

Issue

4

fYear

2004

Firstpage

14

Lastpage

20

Abstract

A new approach to formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots equipped with central panoramic cameras is presented. The approach uses motion segmentation techniques to estimate the position of each leader and omnidirectional visual servoing for tracking and collision avoidance. The paper showed that direct feedback-linearization of the leader-follower dynamics leads to asymptotic tracking but suffers from degenerate configurations. A nonlinear controller was presented that avoids such singularities but can only guarantee input-to-state stability of the formation.

Keywords

collision avoidance; feedback; image motion analysis; image sequences; linearisation techniques; mobile robots; nonlinear control systems; stability; asymptotic tracking; central panoramic cameras; collision avoidance; degenerate configurations; direct feedback-linearization; formation control; input-to-state stability; leader-follower dynamics; motion segmentation techniques; nonholonomic mobile robots; nonlinear controller; omnidirectional visual servoing; position estimation; Cameras; Centralized control; Collision avoidance; Computer vision; Mobile robots; Motion estimation; Motion segmentation; Robot vision systems; Tracking; Visual servoing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1070-9932

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MRA.2004.1371604

Filename

1371604