Title: EXPERIMENTS IN ROBOT FORMATION CONTROL WITH
AN EMPHASIS ON DECENTRALIZED CONTROL
ALGORITHMS.
This is Master Of Science (Mechanical Engineering) Project And Thesis
Abstract: In this thesis, several algorithms and experiments involving the control of robot formations are presented. The algorithms used were focused on decentralized control. The experiments were implemented on two di erent experimental testbeds consisting of teams of wheeled mobile robots. The robots used are described along with their sensors and supporting hardware. Also, there is a discussion of the programming framework used to build the control software. The rst control algorithm and experiment uses a robust consensus tracking algorithm to control a formation of robots to track a desired trajectory. The robots must maintain the correct formation shape while the formation follows the trajectory. This task is complicated by limited communication between the robots, and disturbances applied to the information exchange. Additionally, only a subset of the robots have access to the reference trajectory. In the second experiment, the same algorithm was re-implemented in a decentralized way, which more e ectively demonstrated the goals of the algorithm. The second algorithm involves controlling a formation of robots without a global reference frame. In order to accomplish this, the formation description is reformulated into variables describing the relative positions of the robots, and vision-based measurements are used for control. A homography-based technique is used to determine the relative positions of the robots using a single camera. Then a consensus tracking controller similar to the one used previously is used to distribute the measured information to all of the robots. This is done despite the fact that di erent parts of the information are measured by di erent agents.
Overview: As robots become ever more useful in today’s society, the demand for them to do more continues to grow. Some of the potential applications of robots do not always require a single, incredibly complex robot. Instead, sometimes, a task can be best achieved by a team of simpler robots working together. These teams working together in the real world present several new and interesting challenges. Working together requires communication and coordination that can be di cult in real environments. Because of the challenges and
potential bene ts, control of teams of robots is an active area of research. As new theories are developed for coordination and control of teams of robots, experiments need to be done to evaluate their e ectiveness.
potential bene ts, control of teams of robots is an active area of research. As new theories are developed for coordination and control of teams of robots, experiments need to be done to evaluate their e ectiveness.
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