Citation
Dimitra Panagou, Vijay Kumar. "Cooperative Visibility Maintenance for Leader-Follower Formations in Obstacle Environments". IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2013.

Abstract
Vision-based formation control of multiple agents, such as mobile robots or fully-autonomous cars, has recently re- ceived great interest due to its application in robotic networks and automated highways. This paper addresses the cooperative mo- tion coordination of leader-follower formations of nonholonomic mobile robots, under visibility and communication constraints in known polygonal obstacle environments. We initially consider the case of N = 2 agents moving in L - F fashion and propose a feedback control strategy under which L ensures obstacle avoidance for both robots, while F ensures visibility maintenance with L and inter-vehicle collision avoidance. The derived algo- rithms are based on: set-theoretic methods to guarantee visibility maintenance, dipolar vector fields to maintain the formation shape and the consideration of the formation as a tractor-trailer system to ensure obstacle avoidance. We furthermore show how the coordination and control design extends to the case of N > 2 agents, and provide simulation results which demonstrate the efficacy of the control solutions. The proposed algorithms do not require information exchange among robots, but are instead based on information locally available to each agent. In this way, the desired tasks are executed and achieved in a decentralized manner, with each robot taking care of converging to a desired configuration, while maintaining visibility with its target.

Electronic downloads

• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6767157

• HTML

  Dimitra Panagou, Vijay Kumar. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/224.html"
  >Cooperative Visibility Maintenance for Leader-Follower
  Formations in Obstacle Environments</a>, <i>IEEE
  Transactions on Robotics</i>,  2013.

• Plain text

  Dimitra Panagou, Vijay Kumar. "Cooperative Visibility
  Maintenance for Leader-Follower Formations in Obstacle
  Environments". <i>IEEE Transactions on
  Robotics</i>,  2013.

• BibTeX

  @article{PanagouKumar13_CooperativeVisibilityMaintenanceForLeaderFollowerFormations,
      author = {Dimitra Panagou and Vijay Kumar},
      title = {Cooperative Visibility Maintenance for
                Leader-Follower Formations in Obstacle Environments},
      journal = {IEEE Transactions on Robotics},
      year = {2013},
      abstract = {Vision-based formation control of multiple agents,
                such as mobile robots or fully-autonomous cars,
                has recently re- ceived great interest due to its
                application in robotic networks and automated
                highways. This paper addresses the cooperative mo-
                tion coordination of leader-follower formations of
                nonholonomic mobile robots, under visibility and
                communication constraints in known polygonal
                obstacle environments. We initially consider the
                case of N = 2 agents moving in L - F fashion and
                propose a feedback control strategy under which L
                ensures obstacle avoidance for both robots, while
                F ensures visibility maintenance with L and
                inter-vehicle collision avoidance. The derived
                algo- rithms are based on: set-theoretic methods
                to guarantee visibility maintenance, dipolar
                vector fields to maintain the formation shape and
                the consideration of the formation as a
                tractor-trailer system to ensure obstacle
                avoidance. We furthermore show how the
                coordination and control design extends to the
                case of N > 2 agents, and provide simulation
                results which demonstrate the efficacy of the
                control solutions. The proposed algorithms do not
                require information exchange among robots, but are
                instead based on information locally available to
                each agent. In this way, the desired tasks are
                executed and achieved in a decentralized manner,
                with each robot taking care of converging to a
                desired configuration, while maintaining
                visibility with its target.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/224.html}
  }
  

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 2 Dec 2013.