Distributed Self-Triggered Formation Control for Multiple Mobile Robots With Dynamic Mappings

This article proposes a distributed self-triggered formation control scheme for a group of mobile robots to achieve a desired formation. The robots are assumed to have convex polygon geometric properties. Switching modes are introduced into the distributed formation controller design to balance formation moving and inter-robot collision avoidance of the whole group. A dual-channel self-triggered mechanism is proposed based on the control update triggering time and mapping communication trigger time, in which robots only send their states and mapping information at their event sequences. Establishing this mechanism can effectively equalize the amount of transmitted information and transmission consumption. The minimum control input update time and communication time are introduced to reinforce the robots' ability to run stably and improve the system's robustness. A dynamic mapping scheme is developed based on the desired formation and the time-varying collision conditions to reduce the impact of external environmental perturbations on robot operation while improving the efficiency and robustness of group formation. Simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the novel distributed self-triggered formation control scheme.