A decentralized approach to elementary formation manoeuvres

This paper presents a decentralized formation control (the coupled dynamics approach) for executing elementary formation manoeuvres (EFM) for Hilare-type mobile robots. The concept of an EFM is presented. It is then shown that each of these EFMs possesses a common mathematical structure and thus may be executed by the same type of robot control. We present two EFM controls: the first control puts feedback on the relative motion and the global motion of each robot; and the second one adds inter-robot damping. The key advantage of our approach is the reduced communication among robots and the formation obtains certain robustness properties not available to other formation controls. We present the simulation and hardware results for each of these controls.