Distance-based Formation Control of a Three-Robot System

Distance-based formation control becomes popular since it does not require absolute positions to be sensed by each agent, which makes it suitable for vision-based robot formation control tasks. In this paper, we present a distributed control law for a group of three differential-drive robots to maintain a desired formation with a common desired velocity. As a first step, the control law for a group of three single-integrator modeled agents is presented and proved. Then, the control law is extended to a group of nonholonomic robots by using a coordinate transformation technique while considering the input saturation nonlinearity. Finally, the designed controller is verified in a robot simulator V-REP. Simulation results have shown that the control performance is satisfactory.