A Leader-Follower Flocking System Based on Estimated Flocking Center

This chapter introduces a robot flocking system in which only minority members are the group leaders who have global trajectory knowledge, while majority members are the group followers who do not have global trajectory information, but can communicate with neighbors. The followers even do not know who the leaders are in the group. In order to keep the locking group connected, all the group members estimate the position of flocking center by using a consensus algorithm via local communication. Based on the estimated positions of locking center, a leader-follower flocking algorithm is proposed. A group of real robots, “wifibots”, are used to test the feasibility of the flocking algorithm. The simulation is conducted for a large group to demonstrate its scalability. The results show that this leader-follower locking system can track desired trajectories led by the leaders.