Stability, trajectory following and formation control of wheel mobile robot

Abstract

This paper comprises of two parts, the first one is concerned with controlling a wheeled mobile robot, where the robot is trained to follow a trajectory and the second part is an extension of controlling of the robots by following a trajectory while maintaining their formation intact. Unicycle kinematics is considered for the control design of each robot, and the leader-follower structure for the formation. It is assumed that every robot except the one located at the end of each team, can potentially be a leader to the one behind it. It is also assumed that each follower is capable of sensing its relative distance and relative velocity with respect to its preceding robot. The stability of the control law is also proposed, that is investigated in the case of perfect sensing and in the presence of input saturation. The impact of measurement noise on the followers is then studied assuming that a known upper bound exists on the measurement error, and a linear matrix inequality (LMI) methodology is proposed to design a control law which minimizes the upper bound on the steady-state error. Matlab Simulations are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the results obtained in this paper.