Controlling Swarms of Mobile Robots for Switching between Formations Using Synchronization Concept

This paper presents a synchronous control approach to swarms of mobile robots in switching between formations. According to the desired formation, a synchronization control goal is derived, based on which the position synchronization error is defined as differential position errors between very pair of two neighboring robots. A decentralized trajectory tracking controller is then developed with feedback of both position and synchronization errors, formed with a combination of feedforward and feedback controls. It is proven that this tracking controller can asymptotically converge both position and synchronization errors to zero. Simulations are performed on a group of twenty fully-actuated mobile robots in a switching task between different ellipse curves. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronous control design for the formation control.