Coordinated path following for mobile robots

Abstract

A control strategy for coordinated path following of multiple mobile robots is presented in this paper. A virtual vehicle concept is combined with a path following approach to achieve formation tasks. Our formation controller is proposed for the kinematic model of unicycle-type mobile robots. It is designed in such a way that the path derivative is employed as an additional control input to synchronize the robot's motion with neighboring robots. A second-order consensus algorithm under undirected information exchange is introduced to derive the control law for synchronization. Our controller was validated by simulations and experiments with three unicycle-type mobile robots.