Flocking motion control for a system of nonholonomic vehicles

Abstract

The applications of nonholonomic autonomous systems, such as smart cars and wheeled domestic robots, have gained much attention in the scientific and industrial communities. The non-linearities in the kinematics and dynamics of such systems pause many challenges in stabilizing their motion. In this paper, a motion control system with local and team control objectives is introduced for a flock of nonholonomic vehicles, using bounded input-output feedback linearization. The team control objectives include a navigational control system, which is implemented using smooth state feedback control laws, and a synchronization control system, which is implemented using a smooth position dependent adjacency matrix and communication graph structures. The local control objective involves a collision avoidance scheme, which is implemented using an extended Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy model. The proposed technique is successfully validated in a numerical simulation with 10 differentialdrive mobile robots.