3,723 research outputs found
Certifying non-existence of undesired locally stable equilibria in formation shape control problems
A fundamental control problem for autonomous vehicle formations is formation
shape control, in which the agents must maintain a prescribed formation shape
using only information measured or communicated from neighboring agents. While
a large and growing literature has recently emerged on distance-based formation
shape control, global stability properties remain a significant open problem.
Even in four-agent formations, the basic question of whether or not there can
exist locally stable incorrect equilibrium shapes remains open. This paper
shows how this question can be answered for any size formation in principle
using semidefinite programming techniques for semialgebraic problems, involving
solutions sets of polynomial equations, inequations, and inequalities.Comment: 6 pages; to appear in the 2013 IEEE Multiconference on Systems and
Contro
Controlling rigid formations of mobile agents under inconsistent measurements
Despite the great success of using gradient-based controllers to stabilize
rigid formations of autonomous agents in the past years, surprising yet
intriguing undesirable collective motions have been reported recently when
inconsistent measurements are used in the agents' local controllers. To make
the existing gradient control robust against such measurement inconsistency, we
exploit local estimators following the well known internal model principle for
robust output regulation control. The new estimator-based gradient control is
still distributed in nature and can be constructed systematically even when the
number of agents in a rigid formation grows. We prove rigorously that the
proposed control is able to guarantee exponential convergence and then
demonstrate through robotic experiments and computer simulations that the
reported inconsistency-induced orbits of collective movements are effectively
eliminated.Comment: 10 page
Taming mismatches in inter-agent distances for the formation-motion control of second-order agents
This paper presents the analysis on the influence of distance mismatches on
the standard gradient-based rigid formation control for second-order agents. It
is shown that, similar to the first-order case as recently discussed in the
literature, these mismatches introduce two undesired group behaviors: a
distorted final shape and a steady-state motion of the group formation. We show
that such undesired behaviors can be eliminated by combining the standard
formation control law with distributed estimators. Finally, we show how the
mismatches can be effectively employed as design parameters in order to control
a combined translational and rotational motion of the formation.Comment: 14 pages, conditionally accepted in Automatic Control, IEEE
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Persistent multi-robot formations with redundancy
A multi-robot formation composed of autonomous agents may need to maintain an overall rigid shape for tasks such as collective transport of an object. To distribute control, we construct leader-follow formations in the plane that are persistent: designated “leader” robots control the movement of the entire formation, while the remaining “follower” robots maintain directed local links sensing data to other robots in such a way that the entire formation retains its overall shape. In this paper, we present an approach based on rigidity theory for constructing persistent leader-follower formations with redundancy; specified robots may experience sensor link failure without losing the persistence of the formation. Within this model, we consider the impact of special positions due to certain geometric conditions and provide simulation results confirming the expected behavior
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