Optimal formation shape control of wheeled robots

This paper considers the shape control of a group of mobile robots. The desired formation is only constrained by a shape with a flexible scale. An algorithm is proposed that optimizes the geometric performance during formation attainment. It is shown that the introduction of time varying scale function on the real time positions of robots improves the reliability of estimation in sensor-target localization. The algorithm is validated on the Pioneer wheeled robots platform where feedback linearization is introduced to overcome the nonlinearity of the robots kinematics.