This work presents a control strategy for coordination of multiple robots based on artificial vision to measure the relative posture between them, in order to reach and maintain a specified formation. Given a leader robot that moves about an unknown trajectory with unknown velocity, a controller is designed to maintain the robots following the leader at a certain distance behind, by using visua...

This paper studies the leader-following consensus problem for a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems subject to linearly parameterized uncertainty and disturbance. The problem is solved by integrating the adaptive control technique and the adaptive distributed observer method. The design procedure is illustrated by an example with a group of Van der Pol oscillators as the followe...

In this paper, a stable leader-following formation control for multiple mobile robot systems with limited sensor information is studied. The proposed algorithm is to control a robot (follower) to follow another robot (leader), and easily extended to form any complex formation. The control algorithm requires information available from onboard sensors only, and utilizes estimation of leader’s acc...

Additional Contributions:We thank the following individuals for their leadership and support: Patsy Cho, RN (advanced practice nurse), Diane Beckford, RN (team leader), FlorenceWong, RN (advanced practice nurse), Ordia Kelly, RN (team leader), Andrew E. Simor, MD (Division Head, Infectious Diseases) and Steven Shadowitz (Division Head, General Internal Medicine). We also thank Alex Kiss, PhD, f...

This paper presents a hybrid formation controller approach for nonholonomic mobile robots. This approach is based on the stable switching between a leader-following formation controller and an orientation controller. The switching attempts to maintain low values of formation errors during specific leader movements that otherwise will produce a significant increment on such errors. Experimental ...

In this paper, we investigate the leader-following based formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots. We present a new kinematics model for the leader-follower system using Cartesian coordinates. Based on this new model and the direct Lyapunov method, a globally stable controller is derived for the whole system. Simulation results are included to verify the feasibility of the proposed model...

Leader election is a basic symmetry breaking problem in distributed computing. All nodes of a network have to agree on a single node, called the leader. If the nodes of the network have distinct labels, then agreeing on a single node means that all nodes have to output the label of the elected leader. If the nodes are anonymous, the task of leader election is formulated as follows: every node o...

We analyze in detail a leader election protocol that we call the Swedish leader election protocol. The goal is to select one among n > 0 players, by proceeding through a number of rounds. If there is only one player remaining, the protocol stops and the player is declared the leader. Otherwise, all remaining players flip a biased coin; with probability q the player survives to the next round, w...