Multi-robot Formation Based on Trajectory Design and Model Predictive Control

In many scenarios, robots in a team are often required to collaborate on tasks to improve efficiency. During this process, the whole robot team needs to build up to full formation, and stay in formation until the mission is over. Formation is the moving process of robots for forming and preserving geometric shapes, which is a really very difficult challenge. To solve the problem, this paper gives a solution. (1): Each robot’s anticipated movement trajectory is calculated according to the information of the reference trajectory and the parameter condition guaranteeing the stability of formation. (2): Then controls robots to track their own designed anticipated trajectory in a specified precision range by applying predictive control method based on kinematical model. In this paper, two used formations, namely static formation and dynamic formation, are discussed in details. What’s more, an important fact has been pointed out that our method is feasible and efficient, according to the theoretical analyses and a series of simulations.