Bearing-Only Control Laws For Balanced Circular Formations of Ground Robots

For a group of constant-speed ground robots, a simple control law is designed to stabilize the motion of the group into a balanced circular formation using a consensus approach. It is shown that the measurements of the bearing angles between the robots are sufficient for reaching a balanced circular formation. We consider two different scenarios that the connectivity graph of the system is either a complete graph or a ring. Collision avoidance capabilities are added to the team members and the effectiveness of the control laws are demonstrated on a group of mobile robots.