Modeling and control of formations of nonholonomic mobile robots

This paper addresses the control of a team of nonholonomic mobile robots navigating in a terrain with obstacles while maintaining a desired formation and changing formations when required, using graph theory. We model the team as a triple, ( ), consisting of a group element that describes the gross position of the lead robot, a set of shape variables that describe the relative positions of robots, and a control graph that describes the behaviors of the robots in the formation. Our framework enables the representation and enumeration of possible control graphs and the coordination of transitions between any two formations