APPLICATION OF DISTRIBUTED CONTAINMENT CONTROL TO MULTI-ROBOT SYSTEMS

This thesis proposes the application of a distributed containment control algorithm to a team of mobile robots. The containment controller this thesis builds on [1] was developed for generic linear multi-agent system and tested in simulation only. In this thesis, I particularize the controller for the case of multiple mobile robots by including it into a two-layer control scheme. The high-level controller computes a desired position for the mobile robots, that is then used as reference trajectory for the low-level controller. The resulting control system is implemented as a fully distributed system on a team of mobile robots and validated in simulations and experiments. Additionally the containment controller is tested in a multi-layer control scheme in which the leaders perform encircling control and the followers perform the proposed containment control. Parts of this thesis were submitted to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters with option of presenting at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2022