What is Shape Control

Significant attentions have been drawn to the cooperative control of robot swarms from researchers all over the world during the past decade. This chapter mainly focuses on the shape control problem of a group of homogeneous mobile robots moving into a desired region. A novel topology design of the robot group is proposed with a multilevel-based structure, which can be utilized to construct different shapes for the robot group within the desired region. A controller employing several potential forces is developed to control the robots in forming the desired formation shape while avoiding collisions during their movements. The local minima problem which may cause the robots stuck at undesired positions is further addressed with a novel shape regulation control force. The stability of the controlled system is analyzed using a Lyapunov approach. Simulations and experiments are demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.