Distributed Formation Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots: A Norm-Free Adaptive Event-Triggering Approach

Abstract

A norm-free adaptive event-triggering approach has been recently proposed by the authors to schedule data transmissions in distributed control of nonholonomic mobile robots. Specifically, it has been demonstrated that the proposed approach has the capability in reducing robot-to-robot data transmissions while allowing the position of each robot approach to the position command available only to the leader robot(s). Motivated by this standpoint, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we generalize the proposed approach to the case of formation following. This is more practical because it enables the position of each robot to maintain a desired formation while following the aforementioned position command. Second, we conduct a detailed numerical study to evaluate the effectiveness of this generalized approach in reducing robot-to-robot data transmissions. This evaluation is carried out for a nonholonomic mobile robot system subject to varying factors such as graph topologies, leader selections, and chosen position commands.