Cooperative Behavioural Control for Omni-Wheeled Robots: Experiments and simulations for formation control with obstacle- and collision avoidance

This thesis considers the formation and behavioural control problem of a multirobotsystem. A mathematical model of the mobile vehicles are presented, followedby an introduction to behavioural control. The Null-Space based Behavioural(NSB) control [Antonelli, Arrichiello, and Chiaverini, 2005] is presented, and isused to create task functions for obstacle- and collision avoidance. The formationproblem is solved by a passivity based approach presented in [Arcak, 2007]. Thetwo controllers are combined to create a complete controller capable of maintaininggroup formations, while avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collisions. The resultsare verified by simulations and experiments on custom built robots.