ABSTRACT
Study on formation control of swarms of mobile robots has received increasing attention in recent years. Examples of formation control tasks include assignment of feasible formations, moving into a formation, maintenance of formation shape, and switching between formations. This chapter will introduce how to maintain the networked robots in a time-varying formation while performing a group task as a whole. The relevant applications include exploration (Fox et al. 2000), cooperative robot reconnaissance (Balch and Arkin 1998) and manipulation (Tanner et al. 2003), formation flight control (Mesbahi and Hadaegh 2001), satellite clustering (McInnes 1995), and control of groups of unmanned vehicles (Giulietti et al. 2000; Stilwell and Bishop 2000).
