Design of a switched control Lyapunov function for mobile robots aggregation

This paper proposes a novel aggregation strategy for a network of mobile wheeled robots with constrained dynamics. The strategy assumes a centralized control architecture, which collects all the robot positions and generates the control signals sent to the robots in the network. To do this a control Lyapunov function (CLF) based approach is designed relying on a switched formulation of the robot models. Such a formulation is in fact made possible by constraining the robot motion only to rotation and roto-translation in the plane. Moreover, a collision avoidance objective is taken into account in the design of the CLF. The approach is analyzed, and simulations as well as experiments with six robots show its effectiveness and practical applicability.