Formation Control of Mobile Robots Using Distributed Controller With Sampled-Data and Communication Delays

This brief presents a synchronous formation control approach using distributed controller with sampled-data and communication delay. The local information of each robot is sampled first, and then transmitted to its coupling robots through a network with communication delays, i.e., the information exchanged between coupling robots is the sampled-data with communication delays. The distributed formation controller is designed by using the synchronization approach, which enables mobile robots to maintain time-varying formations while performing a group task in a synchronous manner. A sufficient condition for formation control that can guarantee the exponential convergence of both the position errors and the synchronization errors is obtained by using the Lyapunov approach. Based on the proposed sufficient condition, an upper bound of the sampling period and the communication delay that guarantees mobile robots to converge to the desired formations can be easily obtained. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations and real experiments.