Following the flock
René Vidal, Omid Shakernia, S. Shankar Sastry · IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine · 2004
A new approach to formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots equipped with central panoramic cameras is presented. The approach uses motion segmentation techniques to estimate the position of each leader and omnidirectional visual servoing for tracking and collision avoidance. The paper showed that direct feedback-linearization of the leader-follower dynamics leads to asymptotic tracking but suffers from degenerate configurations. A nonlinear controller was presented that avoids such singularities but can only guarantee input-to-state stability of the formation.