Distributed Disturbance-and-Leader Estimation for Controlling Networks of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

Abstract

This work studies the formation control problem for mobile robots. The distinguishing feature of this work is considering the leader and the followers dynamics to be non-ideal, i.e. subject to disturbances/unmodelled terms. Distributed joint disturbance-and-leader estimators are designed to solve the problem, allowing to reconstruct the leader’s signals in a distributed way. The estimates of the leader and the follower disturbances provided by the estimators are embedded in the control law to reject such disturbances and achieve the formation asymptotically. Lyapunov technique is employed to analyze stability of the overall distributed formation control algorithm. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the theoretical results.