An attempt to self-organized polygon formation control of swarm robots under cyclic topologies

In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling a swarm of mobile robots to formulate a prescribed formation shape under cyclic topologies. By mimicking the shape transformation of elastic strings, we design a distributed control strategy using local sensing quantities. To implement this control algorithm, only a small number of robots need to be regulated to achieve the desired formation shape. It is shown that the desired polygon formation can be globally asymptotically stabilized under the proposed control strategy. Furthermore, in order to adapt to the situations where external influence is not exerted on the “right” robots, we propose a new self-organized control strategy that is capable of transferring the external influence through interacting with their nearest neighboring robots. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies.