Leader–follower formation control with obstacle avoidance using sonar-equipped mobile robots

This article presents a leader–follower formation control of sonar-equipped mobile robots in obstacle scattered environments. The follower robots need to distinguish the leader robot from obstacles by using multiple sonars. In this article, multiple sonars equipped on the follower robots are adaptively assigned to either tracking the leader robot or detecting obstacles. Furthermore, the position of the leader robot is estimated by the follower robots to improve the accuracy of the relative distance and angle. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is examined in experiments using real mobile robots Pioneer 1 and Pioneer 2.