Nonlinear formation control of unicycle-type mobile robots

We investigate formation control of a group of unicycle-type mobile robots at the dynamics level with a little amount of inter-robot communication. A combination of the virtual structure and path-tracking approaches is used to derive the formation architecture. Each individual robot has only position and orientation available for feedback. For each robot, a coordinate transformation is first derived to cancel the velocity quadratic terms. An observer is then designed to globally exponentially/asymptotically estimate the unmeasured velocities. An output feedback controller is designed for each robot. The controller is designed in such a way that the path derivative is left as a free input to synchronize the robots’ motion. Simulations illustrate the soundness of the proposed controller.