Leader-Follower Formation Control of Mobile Sensor Robots for Cable Tunnel Inspection

In this paper, we propose an inspection scheme based on leader-follower formation for mobile sensors robots to accomplish the task of inspecting a cable tunnel to detect potentially danger and provide warning mechanism. We adopt leader-follower formation control to achieve formation and artificial potential field method to avoid the occasional appeared obstacle. The leader possesses abilities of mission planning and formation changing to conduct the entire inspection and the followers simply track the movement of the leader. Unlike the usual tunnel inspection with a single robot, the strategy we proposed in this paper has advantages of wider inspection range, higher accuracy and higher tolerance through the utilization of multi robots system. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.