Bearing-based localization for leader-follower formation control

Qing Han; Shan Ren; Hao Lang; Changliang Zhang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0175378

Bearing-based localization for leader-follower formation control

PLoS One. 2017 Apr 20;12(4):e0175378. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175378. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Qing Han^{1

2}, Shan Ren^{1

2}, Hao Lang², Changliang Zhang²

Affiliations

¹ Engineering College, Honghe University, Honghe Yunnan, China.
² School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.

Abstract

The observability of the leader robot system and the leader-follower formation control are studied. First, the nonlinear observability is studied for when the leader robot observes landmarks. Second, the system is shown to be completely observable when the leader robot observes two different landmarks. When the leader robot system is observable, multi-robots can rapidly form and maintain a formation based on the bearing-only information that the follower robots observe from the leader robot. Finally, simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed formation control.

MeSH terms

Computer Simulation*
Robotics*

Grants and funding

This work is sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51475383, 51075337) and the applied basic research project of Yunnan (grant no. 2013FD049).