Robust Consensus-Based Formation Control of Multi-Robot Systems with Guaranteed Safety

This paper studies the safe leader-following formation control for multiple wheeled-mobile-robots (WMRs) sub-jected to bounded external disturbances under directed communication topology. A consensus-based sliding-mode formation control law is combined with safety barrier certificates for obstacle avoidance and collision-free based on control barrier function (CBF) manipulated by quadratic programming(QP). The development method can realize stable leader-following formation control of multiple WMRs meanwhile guaranteeing collision/obstacle-avoidance. Finally, the proposed control scheme is verified through a numerical simulation.

I. Introduction

In recent years, due to the rapid development of commu-nication and network technologies, the researches on multi-robot systems have received a great deal of interest. Among all the popular research topics of multi-robot systems, the formation control of multiple unmanned mobile robot systems have attracted extensive attentions due to its wide applications in civilian, military fields, et al [1]. Stability and safety are the two essential requirements for formation control. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate control framework that renders stable formation performance while guaranteeing the safety of multi-robot systems.