Leader-following formation control of multiple mobile vehicles

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