Distributed formation control of a networked multi-robot system using estimation based event-trigger communication mechanism

This paper concerns with distributed formation control problem of a multi-robot system subject to limited communication resources and unknown but bounded process measurement noise. In this paper, an estimation-based event-trigger communication scheme is proposed, which uses an estimator on each robot to obtain whether the current measurement should be transmitted. Because of nonlinearity in robot models, non-Gaussian data transition and the ability to reduce the effects of process measurement noise, the extended Kalman filter is used as an estimator in this paper. The proposed event-triggered scheduling scheme provides a better communication rate than other existing ones. The formation is achieved in a distributed manner using estimated data on each robot which means the formation control strategy is not different from a time-based sampling technic.