A New Characterization of Mobility for Distance-Bearing Formations of Unicycle Robots

In this paper, we present a new characterization of mobility for formations of unicycle robots defined by distance-bearing constraints. In fact, by introducing a simple reduction procedure which associates a prescribed formation with a “macro-robot”, we extend the classification by type proposed by Campion et al., to multi-agent systems. To simplify the classification task, which only leverages the nonslip condition for a conventional centered wheel, we assume that the robots are disposed at the vertices of a regular convex polygon. We demonstrate the practical utility of the notion of macro-robot in a trajectory-tracking control problem for a formation of unicycles.