Distributed formation control of networked mobile robots from the Udwadia–Kalaba approach

In this article, formation control of networked mobile robots is studied. Two control strategies for the leaderless case and the leader-following case are developed from the Udwadia–Kalaba approach, respectively. Differing from the existing results about formation control, which focus on kinematic models of robots, this article considers dynamic models and obtained a lower-cost control force. To improve the robustness of the communication network, two distributed formation controllers are designed by establishing distributed estimators. Different from the centralized controllers, the distributed controllers established here only require local information, thus save communication resources and improve system robustness. Finally, some numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the proposed methods are effective and have lower control cost.