Online Leader-Following Formation Navigation with Initial Movements of Followers and Its Experimental Verification

In this paper, we discuss the leader-following formation navigation (LFFN), which is one of the most important issues in formation control. In this formation, one leader is controlled by a human operator, while multiple followers pass along the leader's trajectory in the same motion as the leader. The followers move along the leader's path behind the leader after some intervals. Thus, around the initial time, the followers cannot determine routes to track because there is no leader's path before the initial time. Moreover, if the followers try to mimic the motion of the leader completely, they have to stop at the initial position of the leader. This paper discusses how the followers should move around the initial time in order to start up naturally and to achieve the LFFN afterwards. Comparing to our previous method, these desired follower's velocities can be designed online, and an experiment with two mobile robots demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.