Edge-Weighted Consensus Based Formation Control Strategy With Collision Avoidance Riccardo Falconi 1 , Lorenzo Sabattini 2 , Cristian Secchi 2 , Cesare Fantuzzi 2 , and Claudio Melchiorri 1 1 Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi” (DEI), University of Bologna, Italy. {riccardo.falconi, claudio.melchiorri}@unibo.it 2 Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering (DISMI), University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy {lorenzo.sabattini, cristian.secchi, cesare.fantuzzi}@unimore.it December 18, 2013 Abstract In this paper, a consensus-based control strategy is presented to gather formation for a group of differential-wheeled robots. The for- mation shape and the avoidance of collisions between robots are ob- tained by exploiting the properties of weighted graphs. Since mobile robots are supposed to move in unknown environments, the presented approach to multi-robot coordination has been extended in order to include obstacle avoidance. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy has been demonstrated by means of analytical proofs. More- over, results of simulations and experiments on real robots are provided for validation purposes. 1 Introduction This paper introduces a decentralized control strategy to let a group of robots create a desired geometric formation, by means of local interaction with neighboring robots. The idea of studying algorithms to let a group of mobile agents perform formation control has been directly inspired by the behavior of social animals [1, 2], where local interactions between agents and simple behavioral control exploited by each of them drives to a complex behavior for the entire system, such as in the case of school of fish or birds flocking. The emergence of complex social behaviors leads to the study of more formalized forms of interactions between agents [3, 4, 5, 6]. In particular, 1