Practical consensus tracking control of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in polar coordinates

Abstract

Summary This paper proposes a sliding‐mode control (SMC) method to achieve practical cooperative consensus tracking for a network of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots (MNWMRs) with input disturbances. A novel SMC surface under the nonholonomic constraints is first formulated to characterize the network communication interactions among the networked robots under the framework of polar coordinates. A unified distributed consensus tracking strategy is then proposed by systematically combining a position controller and a direction controller. Furthermore, a simple yet general criterion is derived to achieve the desired practical consensus of trajectory tracking and posture stabilization for MNWMRs. In particular, for a specific common consensus trajectory, the complete asymptotic tracking in heading direction can be fully guaranteed when the perfect asymptotic position‐tracking errors are realized. Accordingly, the developed consensus tracking strategy for MNWMRs demonstrates some advantages of control performance including stability, robustness, and effectiveness over the existing control method proposed for their single‐robot counterparts. Some comparative simulation results are given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative consensus control method.