Distance-based Formation Control Using Angular Information Between Robots

Distance-based formation of groups of mobile robots provides an alternative focus for motion coordination strategies respect to the standard consensus-based formation strategies. However, the setup formulation introduces non rigidity problems, multiple formation patterns that verify the distance constraints or local minima appeared when collision avoidance strategies are added to the control laws. This paper proposes a novel combined distance-based potential functions with attractive-repulsive behavior in order to simplify the navigation problem as well as the use of angular information between robots to reduce the likelihood of unwanted formation patterns. Moreover, this approach eliminates the local minima generated by the control laws to reach the desired formation configuration in the case of three robots. The analysis addresses the case of omnidirectional robots and is extended to the case of unicycle-type robots with numerical simulations and real-time experiments.