Communication-based multiple mobile robots rigid formation control

In this paper, we describe a general multiple mobile robots formation control system through communication channel. With this technique, the multirobot formation control system without environment constraint can be realized. A distinguishing feature of our work is the fact that robot formation relies only on communication whether the members in team sense others or not. Firstly, we propose a kind of multirobot formation architecture based on multi-agent system. Furthermore, in this architecture, modularization agent design is taken. To demonstrate the validity of such framework, an improved closed-up multirobot rigid formation control algorithm is introduced. Our results include a series of virtual robot simulations and experiments using three mobile robots. The results show our design is feasible.