Navigation function of mobile robots for formation driving

Abstract

This paper investigates a vehicle formation control based on the following of a leader by nonholonomic mobile robots with two driving wheels. In this research, we propose a method for creating continuous and non-differentiable navigation functions, from which we derive a formation control law for each robot. The non-differentiability of the proposed navigation function removes the singularity encountered by conventional methods. The stability condition of a formation based on leader-following has been demonstrated by Tanner et al. as 'Leader-to-Formation Stability' (LFS) [1]. In this paper, we assess the LFS property by regarding the navigation function as a LFS Lyapunov function. © 2012 IEEE.