DECENTRALIZED PROCESSING FOR DISTANCE BASED FORMATION CONTROL

The indoor multi-agent robotic testbed named TIGER Square at the LSU iCORE lab is aimed at experimentally validating various formation control laws. The testbed is currently being refined to implement distance-based formation control algorithms in decentralized control scheme in terms of effective sensing of the robot localization, communication protocols, and the control algorithm processing. The scope of work for this research is to modify the testbed subsystems for decentralized processing and establish that the modifications do not affect the formation performance when compared to the fully centralized mode of operation. The decentralized processing of the control algorithms is executed by robots’ upgraded firmware that is introduced in this work. The modifications were validated through a few formation acquisition and formation maneuvering experiments under different modes of operation and varying number of robots in the formation. Preliminary results towards fully decentralized communication between the robots were also presented in this study. The results obtained in this study would serve as a stepping-stone for successfully operating the system in fully decentralized manner. Moreover, it would allow us to consider practical scenarios where a need may arise to switch from centralized mode to decentralized mode due to, for example, loss of GPS or communication with the control station