Abstract:
Control of a group of mobile robots in a
formation requires not only environmental
sensing but also communication among vehicles.
Enlarging the size of the platoon of vehicles
causes difficulties due to communications
bandwidth limitations. Decentralized control
may be an appropriate approach in those cases
when the states of all vehicles cannot be obtained
in a centralized manner. This paper presents a
solution to the problem of decentralized
implementation of a global state-feedback
controller for N mobile robots in a formation.
The proposed solution is based on the design of
functional observers to estimate asymptotically
the global state-feedback control signals by using
the corresponding local output information and
some exogenous global functions. The proposed
technique is tested through simulation and
experiments for the control of groups of
Pinoneer-based non-holonomic mobile robots.
