Formation Control of Mechanical Multi-agent Systems under Relative Measurements and its Application to Robotic Manipulators

This paper addresses a formation control problem of mechanical multi-agent systems. The state of each agent is governed by an Euler-Lagrange system, defined in a heterogeneous configuration space. In contrast, a formation task is carried out in a task space common to all the agents with their end-effectors. The coordinate transformation between the configuration and task spaces is defined with a mapping. Each agent can measure its state in the configuration space and the coordinates of other agents in the task space over its own local frames. We design a distributed controller with local measurements with which the task is achieved. As a typical example, the developed method is applied to a group of robotic manipulators with heterogeneous numbers of links.