Formation Maneuvering Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Robotic Vehicles: Theory and Experimentation
This addresses coordination challenges for robotic vehicles in applications like autonomous fleets, though it is incremental as it builds on existing leader-follower and adaptive control methods.
The paper tackles the formation maneuvering problem for multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots by proposing a decentralized leader-follower control law based on a spanning tree graph, which ensures global acquisition of a planar formation and trajectory tracking in the least squares sense, with experimental and numerical validation.
In this paper, we present a new leader-follower type solution to the formation maneuvering problem for multiple, nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots. The solution is based on the graph that models the coordination among the robots being a spanning tree. Our decentralized control law ensures, in the least squares sense, that the robots globally acquire a given planar formation while the formation as a whole globally tracks a desired trajectory. The control law is first designed at the kinematic level and then extended to the dynamic level. In the latter, we consider that parametric uncertainty exists in the equations of motion. These uncertainties are accounted for by employing an adaptive control scheme. The proposed formation maneuvering controls are demonstrated experimentally and numerically.