Abstract
There are many potential applications of swarm robotic systems in real-world scenarios. In this paper, formation-containment controller design for single-integrator and double-integrator swarm robotic systems with input saturation is investigated. The swarm system contains two types of robots—leaders and followers. A novel control protocol and an implementation algorithm are proposed that enable the leaders to achieve the desired formation via semidefinite programming (SDP) techniques. The followers then converge into the convex hull formed by the leaders simultaneously. In contrast to conventional consensus-based formation control methods, the relative formation reference signal is not required in the real-time data transmission, which provides greater feasibility for implementation on hardware platforms. The effectiveness of the proposed formation-containment control algorithm is demonstrated with both numerical simulations and experiments using real robots that utilize the miniature mobile robot, Mona.
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Funding
This work was supported by EU H2020-FET-OPEN Robocoenosis project [grant number 899520] and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) projects RAIN (EP/R026084/1) and RNE (EP/P01366X/1).
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KW completed the main theory and wrote the draft. JH proposed the research idea and conducted the experiments. BL and FA provided hardware equipment, improved the manuscript and supervised the overall project. All the authors analyzed the theory, discussed the results, reviewed and approved the paper.
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Wu, K., Hu, J., Lennox, B. et al. SDP-Based Robust Formation-Containment Coordination of Swarm Robotic Systems with Input Saturation. J Intell Robot Syst 102, 12 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01368-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01368-4