The paper studies the formation merging problem for a leader-follower network. That is, how to control a team of agents called followers so that they are merged with a team of agents called leaders to form a larger globally rigid formation. Under the premise that a group of leaders move in a globally rigid formation with their synchronized velocity known to the followers, we show that the follo...

In this paper, we present the design, modelling and experimental validation of a novel experimental cam-follower rig for the analysis of bifurcations and chaos in piecewise-smooth dynamical systems with impacts. Experimental results are presented for a cam-follower system characterized by a radial cam and a flat-faced follower. Under variation of the cam rotational speed, the follower is observ...

Using a traditional leader-follower decisional sequence as the manifestation of power structure in a supply chain, this work generalizes extant research in IT security. We propose a game theoretic model to analyze the equilibrium IT security of the supply chain in the Stackelberg game, where the power structure in the supply chain manifests in a natural leader. Our results indicate that a natur...

This paper presents a formated navigation based on the leader-follower approach. In this approach, the control law of the follower robot includes the states of the leader robot. This is a drawback for implementing the control laws on real mobile robots. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a new follower’s control law, called the self-made follower input, in which the state of the lea...

Autonomous Vehicle Following can be achieved if the poses of both the follower and leader vehicles are continuously estimated. This can be achieved by using a Bayesian estimation technique together with a virtual trailer link model. The advantage of such a model is that the follower vehicle will trail a virtual trailer, modeled as an attachment to the leader vehicle, instead of the leader vehic...

The paper deals with leader-follower formations of nonholonomic mobile robots, introducing a formation control strategy alternative to those existing in the literature. Robots control inputs are forced to satisfy suitable constraints that restrict the set of leader possible paths and admissible positions of the follower with respect to the leader. A peculiar characteristic of the proposed strat...

Orientation: Whilst extensive literature is available on leadership, followership under-researched. This study, therefore, pays attention to specific follower behaviours that can influence the leadership process and are passive. Research purpose: study offers deeper insights into their process. Motivation for study: By extending original research in China of Carsten, Uhl-Bien Huang followership...

We consider the problem of having a team of nonholonomic mobile robots follow a desired leader-follower formation using omnidirectional vision. By specifying the desired formation in the image plane, we translate the control problem into a separate visual servoing task for each follower. We use a rank constraint on the omnidirectional optical flows across multiple frames to estimate the positio...

This paper studies the leader-follower formation control for multiple quadrotors. Two controllers are used. The first one is a proportional derivative controller used to ensure the tracking of the leader to the desired trajectory, while the second is based on fuzzy logic in order to achieve the desired formation in ! − ! plane with equal height (!) for all follower quadrotors. In order to ensur...

This paper is concerned with the analysis of a class of impacting systems of relevance in applications: cam-follower systems. We show that these systems, which can be modelled as discontinuously forced impact oscillators, can exhibit complex behaviour due to the detachment at high rotational speeds between the follower and the cam. We propose that the observed phenomena can be explained in term...