Distributed Formation Control of Multi-Robot Systems: A Fixed-Time Behavioral Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed control method for multi-robot systems to achieve time-varying formations in obstacle-rich environments, ensuring fixed-time convergence through a novel behavioral approach.

Contribution

It introduces a fixed-time behavioral control framework that divides formation tasks into prioritized subtasks and combines them using null-space projection for guaranteed convergence.

Findings

Simulation results confirm fixed-time convergence of formation errors.

The method effectively handles environment obstacles.

Distributed control achieves desired formations reliably.

Abstract

This paper investigates a distributed formation control problem for networked robots, with the global objective of achieving predefined time-varying formations in an environment with obstacles. A novel fixed-time behavioral approach is proposed to tackle the problem, where a global formation task is divided into two local prioritized subtasks, and each of them leads to a desired velocity that can achieve the individual task in a fixed time. Then, two desired velocities are combined via the framework of the null-space-based behavioral projection, leading to a desired merged velocity that guarantees the fixed-time convergence of task errors. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is demonstrated by simulation results.