Control of a Group of Mobile Robots Based on Formation Abstraction and Decentralized Locational Optimization

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24560546
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Control engineering
• Research Institution: Kyoto University
• Principal Investigator: FUKUSHIMA Hiroaki 京都大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 講師 (40377015)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: ロボット群の制御

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We proposed a method of controlling a group of mobile robots based on formation abstraction. The shape of a formation is represented by a deformable polygon to go through narrow spaces without colliding with obstacles. If the trajectory of the front end point, the formation automatically reshapes itself to fit the area through which the front part of the group has already safely passed. Further, the robots continuously try to optimize their positions to decrease the risk of collisions by integrating a decentralized locational optimization algorithm into the formation control. We showed that the objective function does not decrease for fixed and nonconvex polygonal formation shapes if the zero-order hold control is applied for a sufficiently short sampling period. We also analyzed the influence of the locational optimization algorithm on the objective function in the case of variable formations. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated in simulations and experiments.

Free Research Field

制御工学