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The International Journal of Robotics Research
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0278364909340280v1
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Article

Planning and Control of Ensembles of Robots with Non-holonomic Constraints

Nathan Michael, Ph.D.* and Vijay Kumar

GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nmichael{at}grasp.upenn.edu.


  Abstract

In this paper we focus on the construction of distributed formation control laws that permit the control of individual mobile robots in a formation to a desired distribution with minimal knowledge of the global state. As in previous work, we consider an abstraction of the team that is derived from a shape descriptor of the ensemble and the position and orientation of the ensemble. We consider the control of the abstract state with decentralized control laws which are independent of the number of agents. However, we incorporate an important departure from previous work by explicitly modeling the shape of the robot, the geometric, non-interpenetration constraints and non-holonomic, kinematic constraints. Further, we propose a motion planning technique to plan motions for ensembles of robots. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms on a team of differential drive robots in simulation and on real hardware.

First published on June 26, 2009, doi:10.1177/0278364909340280

The International Journal of Robotics Research 2009;28:962.

A more recent version of this article appeared on August 1, 2009

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