Robust formation control without velocity measurement of the leader robot

•This paper addresses the control problem of leader–follower scheme of multiple mobile robots.•The velocity measurement of the leader vehicle is excluded from the control design.•A nonlinear filter is designed to estimate the leader's velocities.•The RBF-NN compensation technique is used to compensate for the dynamic uncertainties.

In this paper a control problem of leader–follower motion coordination of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots is addressed and subsequently in the proposed scheme, a reference trajectory generated based on the information from the leader is tracked by the follower robots. To alleviate demanded information on the leader, specifically to eliminate the measurement requirement or estimation of the leader's velocity and dynamics, a virtual vehicle is constructed whereby its trajectory converges to the reference trajectory of the follower. Trajectory tracking controller is then designed to allow the follower robot to track the virtual vehicle using neural network approximation, in combination with the backstepping and Lyapunov direct design technique and finally the performance and effectiveness of the controller is verified throughout the experiments.