Formation by Consensus in Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms with Twins-in-the-Loop

This paper presents a case of experimentation with heterogeneous robots swarms (quadrotors and differential drive robots) where part of the agents are real and the rest are digital twins. The software architecture has been developed in ROS2 Foxy, which provides a framework in which real or virtual agents are indistinguishable from the communication point of view. The developed platform allows to define different control objectives for multi-agent systems. In this paper, we illustrate how the formation control of the heterogeneous multi-agent system is achieved. The formation is defined by means of vectors that represent the desired relative positions between agents.