Distributed Circular Formation Control of Multi-Robot Systems with Directed Communication Topology

This paper investigates the circular formation control problem of multiple mobile robots. Each robot is assumed to have its local coordinate frame and the communication topology of the networked multi-robot systems is modeled by a directed graph containing a spanning tree. A distributed dynamic control law is developed by using the measurement via local sensing and the information of its neighbors via communication. It is shown that with the proposed control law, all robots can globally converge to orbiting around a given center which is only known to one robot, and maintaining a desired spacing formation along the circle. Finally, simulation results of an example verify the effectiveness of the proposed control law.