Safety-Critical Formation Control of Non-Holonomic Multi-Robot Systems in Communication-Limited Environments

This paper presents a robust estimator-based safety-critical controller for formation control of non-holonomic mobile robots in communication-limited environments. The proposed decentralized framework integrates a robust state estimator with a formation tracking control law that guarantees inter-agent collision avoidance using control barrier functions. String stability is incorporated into the control design to maintain stability against noise from predecessors in leader-follower formations. Rigorous stability analysis using Lyapunov functions ensures the stability of estimation errors and the convergence of the formation to desired configurations. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach are validated through numerical simulations of various maneuvers and realistic Gazebo experiments involving formations in a warehouse environment. The results demonstrate the controller's ability to maintain safety, achieve precise formation control, and mitigate disturbances in scenarios without inter-robot communication.