Distributed Formation Control of Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robots Subject to Longitudinal Slippage Constraints

Abstract

This paper investigates the distributed formation control problem of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots within real environments. The formation pattern of the system adopts leader-follower structure and the communication topology among the multirobot system is modeled by a directed graph. Slippage is hard to avoid due to the possible existence of ice, sand, or muddy roads. To overcome the effect of slippage, an adaptive trajectory tracking controller for leader robot is designed, such that the leader robot can keep up with the virtual reference trajectory and estimate the real value of unknown slipping ratio accurately. In addition, it is difficult for each follower robot to obtain leader's states in a large formation system, so distributed formation controllers are designed based on distributed observers. It is shown that the proposed controllers can realize formation objective and overcome the slippage constraints at the same time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controllers is verified by simulation results.