SWITCHING CONTROL AND MODELING OF

MOBILE ROBOTS FORMATION

F. Bravo, D. Patino, K. Melo, C. Parra
Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electronics, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Bogotá, Colombia.

Abstract—This paper presents the design of a decentralized and maintain its position in the formation. One of the main
cooperative control law, based on a leader-follower approach. problems of this approach is that the leader must be the same
This control law generates formation trajectories that should during the movement along the trajectory. Thus, it cannot
follow each mobile robot to establish and maintain a specific
geometry formation while the robots formation moves along a change to the follower role.
predefined trajectory. By taking advantage of the continuous and This paper describes a formation control strategy of a team
discrete dynamics of the leader-following approach, we model the of mobile robots and presents the design of a trajectory
formation control as a switching control. This allows any robot generator control under the leader-follower approach. The
to be part of the formation as leader or follower any time. The goal is to generate the formation trajectories that each mobile
control law is validated through simulation.
robot should follow to establish a formation pattern and also
I. INTRODUCTION to maintain it during the movement along the predefined
trajectory. The main contribution of this paper is the modeling
One of the most interesting applications of cooperative of the whole systems as a switched system. This allows that
robotics is the formation control of mobile robots. It consists any robot can take the leader role or the follower role at any
on a group of mobile robots which establish and maintain time.
a geometrical shape, e.g. a line, square or circle during The paper is organized as follows: Section II describes
their way to their goal [1][2]. The movement of a robot’s the formation control. Section III presents the mobile robot
group can be useful to perform different cooperative tasks, model for generation of formation trajectories. Section IV
e.g. manipulation and transport of weight or large objects, shows a brief description of the leader-follower approach
exploration, construction of maps in unknown environments, defining the local information that receives each follower
vigilance and security operations, search and rescue missions robot. Section V presents the leader-follower approach
or simply, to help people in the study of biological and social modeled as a switched system. Section VI proposes the
behaviors [2][3][4][5]. trajectory generator control for N mobile robots. Section VII
Many issues in formation control have been actively inves- gives the simulation results and discussion on the obtained
tigated in the latest decade. The stability of the formation, results and finally in section VIII, conclusions are exposed.
controllability of different formation patterns and obstacle
avoiding are examples of these issues [6]. Several cooperative
control approaches have been proposed to solve these issues II. FORMATION CONTROL
and can be classified into three different groups: the leader- The formation control problem for a group of mobile
follower [7][8],[9] the virtual structure [10][11] [12] and the robots can be divided into two independent control stages
behavior-based [13][14][15]. (see Fig. 1). The first stage is a control law that generates
The leader-follower approach is the most commonly used in formation trajectories, and the second stage is a trajectory
robot formations. It consists in the use of one or more robots tracking control. The formation trajectory generator control
as leaders and the rest as followers. The main function of is based on cooperative control leader-follower approach. It
the leader is to guide the robots formation through a desired generates reference trajectories that allow the relative positions
trajectory. On the other hand, each follower must establish of the robots, converge into a desired geometric shape and
maintain this formation of mobile robots during the movement
F. Bravo, Electronic Engineer. M.Sc., Bogotá, Colombia, along a predefined trajectory. The formation trajectory tracking
[email protected]
D. Patino, Electronic Engineer, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department control is responsible for generating the linear and angular
of Electronics. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia, velocities that should have each mobile robot to precisely
[email protected] follow the formation trajectory. This takes into account the
K. Melo, Electronic Engineer, M.Sc. Mechanical Enginee-
ring, Ph.D.(c), Researcher at Group SIRP, Bogotá, Colombia, kinematic constraints and dynamic effects on the robot.
[email protected] Let us considerer a formation of N mobile robots. Each
C. Parra, Electronic Engineer, Ph.D., Director of the Master robot in the formation is represented by the symbol Rk with
in Electronic Engineering, Titular Professor, Department of
Electronics. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia, k = 1, 2, . . . , N . Let TfRk be the formation trajectories that
[email protected] should follow the mobile robot Rk in order to establish a
 ROBOT MODEL 1
Dynamic
matrices AR , BR y CR have the following form [16][17]:
Kinematic
Reference trajectory
for the leader robot
Model Model ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
0 1 0 0 0 0
⎢ 0 0 0 0 ⎥ ⎢ 1 0 ⎥
AR = ⎢⎣ 0 0 0
⎥ BR = ⎢ ⎥
TRAJECTORY TRAJECTORY
ROBOT MODEL 2
1 ⎦ ⎣ 0 0 ⎦
GENERATOR TRACKING Dynamic Kinematic
CONTROL CONTROL Model Model 0 0 0 0 0 1 (4)

1 0 0 0
CR =
ROBOT MODEL N 0 0 1 0
Dynamic Kinematic
Model Model
The robot position xpk and velocity xvk vectors are given the
following equations:
Fig. 1. Control strategy block diagram.  T  T
xpk = xRk yRk x vk = ẋRk ẏRk (5)

specific formation pattern and maintain it during movement

along desired trajectory. The trajectory TfRk is associated to
inertial coordinate systems (X, Y ) and it is defined as follows:
IV. DESCRIPTION OF THE LEADER-FOLLOWER
 T APPROACH
TfRk = T xk T yk αk (1)
In the leader-follower approach, the robot j of the formation
where T xk and  T yk are the X and Y position respectively ( Rk=j , j ∈ {1, 2, . . . , N }) is assumed to be the formation
and αk = tan−1 Ṫ yk /Ṫ xk is the orientation of the mobile leader and is denoted RLj . The other robots Rk=i ∀ i =
robot in the plane. The formation trajectories TfRk can be {1, 2, . . . N − 1 } i = j, are assigned as follower robots and
used by the tracking control system of any robot that moves are denoted as Rfi . The main function of the leader robot RLj
on the (X, Y ) plane. is to guide the formation
 to follow
T the predefined reference
This article focuses primarily on the design of the trajectory trajectory TRL = xref yref . Where TRL is defined in
generation control, based in the leader-follower approach and the inertial coordinate system. Each follower robot Rfi should
it is modeled as a switched system. establish and maintain its position in formation while the
formation of robots are moving along the trajectory assigned
by the leader robot. The follower robots only know the relative
displacements of their adjacent robots which can include the
III. MOBILE ROBOT MODEL leader, the trajectory TRL is unknown by the follower robots.
Adjacent robots make reference to mobile robots group which
For trajectories generation, the mobile robot is modeled as a provide to Rfi , the information about its state.
particle that moves in the plane (X, Y ) [16][17]. The dynamic
behavior of motion robot is represented by the following set
of differential equations:

ẋ = v
(2)
v̇ = f (t, x, v)

where x is the position and v is the velocity. The sta-

te vector of the mobile robot Rk in function of position
and velocity components in the (X, Y ) plane is xk =
 T
xRk ẋRk yRk ẏRk the following state equation is
obtained [18][19]:

ẋk (t) = AR xk (t) + BR uk (t) xk ∈ 4

(3)
yk (t) = CR xk (t)

where uk = [ f1 (t, x, v) f2 (t, x, v) ]T is the input control

 T Fig. 2. Representation of a triangle formation of three mobile robots.
vector of the robot Rk and the output yk = T xk T yk
is the position vector of the robot in the (X, Y ) plane. The
A. Formation definition and local information
 T
Let hpk = hx k hy k be the absolute position of
each mobile robot in formation (robot position with respect
to inertial reference frame, see Fig. 2). Vector hk is defined
as follows:
 T  T
hk = hpk ⊗ 1 0 = hx k 0 hy k 0 (6) Fig. 3. Robot model as switched system.
where ⊗ represents the Kronecker product. Let gk be a vector
that contains information about relative displacements and
velocities of each robot with respect to its absolute position, A. Controller design for each operation mode
that is: The goal of trajectory generator control is to find the control
g k = xk − hk (7) inputs, such that the positions of all robots converge to the
Since each follower robot uses information of the adjacent desired formation. The objective of the controller mode 1 is
robots’ state, we define the vector GTk as the average of the that the output asymptotically follows the trajectory TRL . This
relative displacements and velocities of the adjacent ones [20], is a classic problem of tracking a reference and can be solved
which is given by: by state feedback. The objective of the mode 2 controller is
1  that the error in relative displacement and velocity zk of the
GTk = gi (8) robot tends towards zero. This is a stabilization problem that
|℘k | i∈℘
k can be solved by output feedback.
where ℘k ⊂ [1, N ] is a set of adjacent robots of the follower
robot and |℘k | is the cardinal number of the set ℘k . Thus, the control inputs uRlk and uRfk when the robot takes
Let zk be the relative displacement and velocity error gk leader role and follower role respectively, are given by:
of robot Rfi with respect to the average of the relative
displacements GTk of its adjacent robots, that is: uRlk = TRL − KL xk
(10)
uRfk = KF zk
zk = gk − GTk (9)
KL and KF are the feedback matrices and they are defined
If zk = 0 the robot Rk is in formation, then the objective of
as follows:
the control is to make zk tends towards zero (zk → 0). This 
is a regulation problem. In next section the controller design 1 kL1 0 0
KL =
for the follower robot is detailed. 0 0 1 kL2
 (11)
V. MODELING OF THE LEADER-FOLLOWER kF 1 kF 2 0 0
KF =
APPROACH AS A SWITCHED SYSTEM 0 0 kF 1 kF 2
Consider a formation of N mobile robots under the leader-
follower approach, the fact that each robot in the formation
can take two different roles allows modeling the robot as a
switched system. Fig. 3 shows the operation modes of mobile
robot. When the robot is designated as leader robot, it will
operate in the Mode 1. It generates the formation trajectory that
allows to achieve the trajectory TRL . If the robot is designated
as follower robot, it operates in the Mode 2. It generates
the formation trajectory that allows following the robot for
establishing and maintaining its position in the formation using
only the local information provided by the adjacent robots.
Therefore, the discrete dynamic is given by the two operation
modes of the mobile robot and the continuous dynamics are
given by continuous behavior of the robot in each operation
mode. Due to discrete and continuous behavior, the robot is
modeled as a switched system. This allows the robot to take
the leader or follower role any time.
Using this switched systems model for a mobile robot under
leader-follower approach, we propose the trajectory generator
control for N mobiles robots which is shown in Fig. 4. Note
that the switched system of the Fig. 3 is repeated N times and
that the input zk varies according to each robot. Fig. 4. Scheme of the trajectory generator control
 example, the communication topology of the robots can be
perfectly captured in a directed graph or digraph Γ [20]. Each
vertex of the graph represents a robot in the formation. The
communication flow between the robots is defined by edges
or arcs (directed). In order to determine the communication
topology, we should assume that all robots, in the formation
are follower robots. For example, let us considerer the case of
six mobile robots (N = 6) in a triangle formation (see Fig.
6(a)), the communication between the robots is represented
by the communication digraph Γ as can be seen in Fig. 6(b).
Fig. 5. Controller for operation modes The Laplacian is a powerful tool of the graph theory that
allows us to easily define the errors in relative displacement
and velocity zk of each robot in the formation. It is defined
Using Routh-Hurwitz criterion, following conditions of ele-
as follows:
ments KL and KF , which guarantee the stability of the close
LΓ = DΓ − AΓ (16)
loop system in each mode of operation, are found:
kL1 + kL2 > 0 and kL1 kL2 > 0 Where D Γ is the diagonal matrix and A Γ is the adjacency
(12) matrix of the communication graph Γ. Thus, the dynamics of
kF 1 < 0 and kF 2 < 0
The values of the elements of the feedback matrices are taken
for example as: kL1 = 1, kL2 = 2, kF 1 = −5 and kF 2 =
−5,5.
B. Model of mobile robot as a switched system
The control input uk is different for each operating mode
of the mobile robot. The state equation described in (3) is
redefined as:

AR xk (t) + Bl URk (t) if RK is leader
ẋk (t) =
AR xk (t) + Bf URk (t) if RK is f ollower
yk (t) = CR xk (t)
Fig. 6. Six mobile robots in a triangle formation.
zk (t) = (xk (t) − hk ) − GT
(13)
where xk represents the positions and velocities of the robot N mobile robots can be grouped into a single system as:
Rk . Vector URk contains the control inputs for each mode: ẋ = A x + B u x ∈ N
 y=Cx (17)
uRlk
U Rk =
uRfk
(14) z = L (x − H)
where x represents the positions and velocities of N robots in
uRlk , uRfk ∈ 2 are control inputs for the leader mode and
formation. The matrices A, B and C are given by:
the follower mode respectively. They are given by the equation
(10). The output yk is a vector with the position of the robot A = IN ⊗ AR
in the plane (X, Y ) and the output zk indicates the error in B = [(IN − Ml ) ⊗ (Bf )] + [(Ml ) ⊗ (Bl )] (18)
relative displacement and velocity. C = IN ⊗ C R
The matrices AR and CR are given by the equation (4). The
matrices Bl and Bf , choose the appropriate control signal for IN is the identity matrix of size N × N and Ml ∈ N ×N is
the mode of operation. They are given by: a diagonal matrix that specifies which is the formation leader
⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎞ robot:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
⎜ 1 0 0 0 ⎟ ⎜ 0 0 1 0 ⎟ 1 if RK is leader
Ml = diag(a1 , . . . , aN ) with ak =
Bl = ⎜ ⎟ ⎜
⎝ 0 0 0 0 ⎠ Bf = ⎝ 0 0 0 0 ⎠ (15)
⎟ 0 if RK is f ollower
(19)
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 For simplicity, diagonal matrix is represented as diag(.),
whose arguments are elements of the diagonal. The vector
u contains the control signals of all robots. It is given by:
VI. PROPOSED CONTROLLER FOR THE ⎛ ⎡ ⎤⎞ ⎛ ⎡ ⎤⎞
1 0 0 0
GENERATION OF FORMATION TRAJECTORIES ⎜ ⎢ 0 1 ⎥⎟ ⎜ ⎢ 0 0 ⎥⎟
u=⎜ ⎢ ⎥⎟ ⎜ ⎢
⎝IN ⊗ ⎣ 0 0 ⎦⎠ ul + ⎝IN ⊗ ⎣ 1 0 ⎦⎠ uf (20)
⎥⎟
In robot formation, the graph theory has been a great tool
for representing different formation parameters [19] [20]. For 0 0 0 1
  T
Where ul = uRl 1 uRl 2 . . . uRlN and uf = The initial conditions of the robots are the following:
 T    
uRf 1 uRf 2 . . . uRfN are vectors which contain the
control inputs for each mode of operation. These vectors are  xo1 ẋo1 yo1 ẏo1 = 0 0,1 0,1 0 

defined as:  xo2 ẋo2 yo2 ẏo2 = 0 0,1 0,3 0 

xo3 ẋo3 yo3 ẏo3 = 0 0,1 −0,1 0
ul = (1N ×1 ⊗ TRL ) − (IN ⊗ KL ) x
(21) Fig. 8 shows the formation trajectories generated for a constant
uf = (IN ⊗ KF ) z
reference trajectory TRL (xref (t) = t, yref (t) = 0,5). The
1N ×1 is a vector of ones, its size is N × 1. robot R3 is assigned as the leader. Fig. 9 shows trajectories
z = L(x − H) is the output function with errors in relative generated for the case of sinusoidal trajectory. Robot R2 is
displacement and velocity of the robots [16][20]. L is a matrix the formation leader. Note that we generate the formation
of size 2N × 2N defined as: trajectories that allow a group of three mobile robots follow
L = L Γ ⊗ IN (22) the reference trajectory for the leader robot and the desired
pattern formation is maintained. The leader robot successfully
H contains the formation vectors of all robots and it is defined follows the reference trajectory and the follower robots are
as: ⎡ ⎤ able to establish and maintain its position in the formation.
hp1
 ⎢ h ⎥  Now let us considerer a formation leader change, formation
1 ⎢ p2 ⎥ 1 trajectories generated are shown in Fig. 10. Note that the
H = hp ⊗ =⎢ . ⎥⊗ (23)
0 ⎣ .. ⎦ 0 leader robot changes every 20 seconds; initially, the robot R2
hpN assumes the formation leadership, next R1 robot becomes the
leader and finally we generate the trajectories for the robot
hp is a vector of N × 1 with the absolute positions of the
R3 to take the leadership role.
robots in formation. In the next section, we illustrate the
application of the formation trajectory generator control for
three mobile robots.

VII. RESULTS
This section presents the analysis of simulation results of
the formation trajectory generator control discussed in section
VI.
Consider three mobile robots in a triangle formation (see
Fig.7). The absolute positions of the robots in the formation
are:  T
hp1 = 0,4 0
 T
hp2 = 0 0,4
 T
hp3 = 0 −0,4
The formation communication is described in Fig.7. All robots
are considered as followers. The adjacency matrix A Γ which
describes the communication topology of the formation is: Fig. 8. Constant reference for formation trajectories.
⎡ ⎤
0 1 1
AΓ = ⎣ 1 0 1 ⎦
1 1 0 VIII. CONCLUSIONS
A strategy to achieve robot formation is the approach given
by the leader-follower cooperative control. In this approach,
a robot is assigned to perform the role of formation leader
and the other robots, the followers role. The fact that each
robot in formation can take two different roles: leader robot
and follower robot, allows modeling the formation control as
a hybrid dynamic system, specifically as a switching system.
The advantage of this type of modeling, is the flexibility to
the robot formation to change the leader at any time.
It was shown by simulation that there is a good performance
of the control strategy for formation trajectories generation.
The leader robot successfully follows the reference trajectory
Fig. 7. Three mobile robots in a triangle formation. and the follower robots are able to establish and maintain
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