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Multiagent-Based Multi-team Formation Control for Mobile Robots

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Abstract

In the field of formation control, researchers generally control multiple robots in only one team, and little research focuses on multi-team formation control. In this paper, we propose an architecture, called Virtual Operator MultiAgent System (VOMAS), to perform formation control for multiple teams of mobile robots with the capabilities and advantages of scalability and autonomy. VOMAS is a hybrid architecture with two main agents. The virtual operator agent handles high level missions and team control, and the robot agent deals with low level formation control. The virtual operator uses four basic services including join, remove, split, and merge requests to perform multi-team control. A new robot can be easily added to a team by cloning a new virtual operator to control it. The robot agent uses a simple formation representation method to show formation to a large number of robots, and it uses the concept of potential field and behavior-based control to perform kinematic control to keep formation both in holonomic and nonholonomic mobile robots. In addition, we also test the stability, robustness, and uncertainty in the simulation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

    Harry Chia-Hung Hsu & Alan Liu

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  1. Harry Chia-Hung Hsu
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  2. Alan Liu
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Correspondence to Harry Chia-Hung Hsu.

Additional information

This research was supported by the National Science Council under grant NSC 91-2213-E-194-003.

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Hsu, H.CH., Liu, A. Multiagent-Based Multi-team Formation Control for Mobile Robots. J Intell Robot Syst 42, 337–360 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-005-2965-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-005-2965-7

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