Decentralized centroid and formation control for multi-robot systems

In this paper, a decentralized control strategy for networked multi-robot systems that allows the tracking of the team centroid and the relative formation is presented. The proposed solution consists of a distributed observer-controller scheme where, based only on local information, each robot estimates the collective state and tracks the two assigned control variables. We provide a formal stability analysis of the observer-controller scheme and we relate convergence properties to the topology of the connectivity graph. Experiments are presented to validate the approach.