On Feedback Speed Control for a Planar Tracking
For multi-agent systems and robotics, this work provides a theoretically grounded control law for formation tracking, though the problem is domain-specific and the results are incremental.
This paper proposes a novel feedback speed control law for planar tracking between leader and follower agents, proving asymptotic stability with known leader steering and input-to-state stability otherwise. Numerical simulations and robot experiments validate the approach, which scales to N-agent chains.
This paper investigates a planar tracking problem between a leader and follower agent. We propose a novel feedback speed control law, paired with a constant bearing steering strategy, to maintain an abreast formation between the two agents. We prove that the proposed control yields asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system when the steering of the leader is known. For the case when the leader's steering is unavailable to the follower, we show that the system is still input-to-state stable with respect to the leader's steering viewed as an input. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if the leader's steering is periodic, the follower will asymptotically converge to a periodic orbit with the same period. We validate these results through numerical simulations and experimental implementations on mobile robots. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of the proposed approach by extending the two-agent control law to an N-agent chain network, illustrating its implications for directional information propagation in biological and engineered flocks.