Formation Control of Three Mobile Robots With Varying Distances

This paper focusses on distributed formation control, a task in which the desired formation shape is controlled by maintaining relative distances between robots. This task is based on the acyclic directed triangular formation with distance-based control. The novelty proposed in this work is the possibility of varying distances that need to be tracked in the formation control task. The focus is on the case where some distances are not constant values but a function dependent on the leader’s velocity. An example application, serving as motivation for the analysis conducted, is the vehicles moving in urban traffic, which should maintain a distance between preceding vehicles proportional to their speed for safety reasons.