Multiple mobile robot control became intensively investigated area of robotics in the last few years. This is due to a wide range of applications and the availability of technologies supporting the development of mobile robotics. Designing effective control algorithms remains currently the most challenging problem.
Regardless of the main purpose of the application, one of the basic problems is formation motion control. There are three classes of solutions: virtual structure, behavioral approach and leader-following methods. In this talk a review of leader-follower methods for the multiple differentially driven mobile platforms is presented. The goal is to track the desired trajectory by the formation. In this approach only one robot called leader knows the desired trajectory. The others form a queue. For each of them control problem reduces to the task of maintaining a constant (predefined) distance from the predecessor.
Most of the algorithms known from the literature assume that initial configuration of robots ensures that collisions cannot occur. In the presented methods collision avoidance behavior is part of the algorithm. Initial configurations may be ‘difficult’, that minds that during the process of forming the queue robots can get close to each other, but the collision will not occur, which is guaranteed by the algorithm.