A QUICK-CONVERGING DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM FOR GENERATING ARBITRARY SHAPE OF MOBILE ROBOT TROOP

Because of the difficulties in generating arbitrary shape cooperatively and determining formation-vectors autonomously for multiple mobile robots when multiple mobile robots are to achieve a common task, an autonomous formation-vector determination method is first proposed for every agent. And then a formation-vector-based control algorithm is extended theoretically to generate given arbitrary formation shape and a robot motion strategy is improved to shorten convergence time. Finally, a quick-converging distributed algorithm for generating arbitrary shape of multiple mobile robot group is proposed. The simulation results show that the robot group can converge at given arbitrary formation shape and the convergence time is only 10 percent or so, compared with the existing algorithms.