Distributed Estimation and Control for Leader-Following Formations of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

摘要

The problem of the leader-following formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots is addressed in this paper. A distributed formation control strategy using explicitly the coordination errors among robots is proposed without assuming that each follower robot knows the full state of the leader. First, a distributed estimation law is proposed for each follower robot to estimate the states, including the position, orientation and linear velocity of the leader. The distributed formation control law is then designed based on the estimated states of the leader and the neighborhood formation tracking error. Under some mild assumptions on the interaction graph among the leader and the follower robots and the velocity of the leader, asymptotic convergence of formation tracking errors to zero can be achieved. Finally, some numerical simulations and experiments on a group of nonholonomic mobile robots are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.