A Unified Formation Control Scheme with a Single or Multiple Leaders

In the exploration and implementation of formation control schemes, bandwidth limitations and communication breakdown form a barrier to large scale formation control applications. The limitations of current formation control strategies involving a leader-follower approach and a consensus-based formation control approach with fully available group trajectory information are explored. A unified formation control scheme that accommodates an arbitrary number of group leaders and arbitrary information flow between vehicles is proposed. The scheme requires only local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange. In particular, an extended consensus algorithm is applied on the group level to estimate the time-varying group trajectory information in a distributed manner. Based on the estimated group trajectory information, a consensus-based distributed formation control strategy is then applied for vehicle level control. The proposed scheme is experimentally implemented on a multi-robot platform under local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange. The effect of a single or multiple leaders within the formation is also experimentally explored and discussed.