PhD defense Héctor Garcia de Marina Peinado: Distributed formation control for autonomous robots

This thesis addresses several theoretical and practical problems related to formation-control of rigid frameworks. First the focus is on dealing with the robustness issues of having inconsistent measurements, e.g. biases in the agents’ range sensors. Secondly a distributed method for steering a rigid formation in a rotation and/or translation manner - with respect to a frame of coordinates attached to the formation itself - is proposed. This result is further extended in order to solve some practical problems: the design of a constant translation of the formation with a controlled orientation with respect to a global frame of coordinates; the tracking and enclosing of a target problem where one assigns a desired formation shape to specify how the target is enclosed and tracked by the pursuers; and controlling the morphing of the formation shape. Finally, throughout the thesis practical experiments with actual mobile robots covering the developed algorithms for first-order dynamics are showed and a series of tracking controllers for quadcopters in order to validate the estimator-based and motion-morphing-control algorithms for the second-order dynamics case have been developped.