Leader-Following Formation of Switching Multirobot Systems via Internal Model

In this paper, the leader-following formation problem of multirobot systems with switching interconnection topologies is considered. The robots are required to move in a formation with formation constrains described in terms of relative distances of the robots and the formation (as whole entity) is required to track the trajectory generated by an exosystem. The exosystem of the considered multirobot systems provides driving forces or environmental disturbance, whose dynamics is different from the dynamics of the robots. A systematic distributed design approach for the leader-following formation problem is proposed via dynamic output feedback with the help of canonical internal model.