Coordinated path-following control for a group of mobile robots with velocity recovery

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of coordinated path following where multiple mobile robots are required to follow a prescribed path while keeping a desired inter-robot formation pattern. A combination of the Lyapunov techniques and graph theory is used to derive the formation architecture. Path following for each vehicle consists of converging the geometric error at the origin. Vehicles' coordination is achieved by adjusting the speed of each vehicle along its path according to information on the positions and speeds of a subset of the other vehicles of the group. Unlike previous research that assume availability of the reference velocity to each mobile robot, the situation is considered where this information is only available to a leader of this formation. The control scheme relies on an adaptive design to estimate the reference velocity which the other mobile robots need to reconstruct to recover the desired formation. Simulations results are presented and discussed.