Title: Robust Distributed Planar Formation Control for Higher-Order Holonomic and Nonholonomic Agents,
Abstract: We present a distributed formation control strategy for agents with a variety
of dynamics to achieve a desired planar formation. The proposed strategy is
fully distributed, does not require inter-agent communication or a common sense
of orientation, and can be implemented using relative position measurements
acquired by agents in their local coordinate frames. We show how the control
designed for agents with the simplest dynamical model, i.e., the
single-integrator dynamics, can be extended to holonomic agents with
higher-order dynamics such as quadrotors, and nonholonomic agents such as
unicycles and cars. We prove that the proposed strategy is robust to
saturations in the input, unmodeled dynamics, and switches in the sensing
topology. We further show that the control is relaxed in the sense that agents
can move along a rotated and scaled control direction without affecting the
convergence to the desired formation. This observation is used to design a
distributed collision avoidance strategy. We demonstrate the proposed approach
in simulations and further present a distributed robotic platform to test the
strategy experimentally. Our experimental platform consists of off-the-shelf
equipment that can be used to test and validate other multi-agent algorithms.
The code and implementation instructions for this platform are available online
and free.