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A formation maneuvering controller for multiple non-holonomic robotic vehicles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Milad Khaledyan  and
Marcio de Queiroz Open the ORCID record for Marcio de Queiroz [Opens in a new window]
Milad Khaledyan
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA. E-mail: mkhale2@lsu.edu
Marcio de Queiroz*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA. E-mail: mkhale2@lsu.edu
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: mdeque1@lsu.edu
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Summary

In this paper, we present a new leader–follower type solution to the translational maneuvering problem for formations of multiple, non-holonomic wheeled mobile robots. The solution is based on the graph that models the coordination among the robots being a spanning tree. Our control law incorporates two types of position errors: individual tracking errors and coordination errors for leader–follower pairs in the spanning tree. The control ensures that the robots globally acquire a given planar formation while the formation as a whole globally tracks a desired trajectory, both with uniformly ultimately bounded errors. The control law is first designed at the kinematic level and then extended to the dynamic level. In the latter, we consider that parametric uncertainty exists in the equations of motion. These uncertainties are accounted for by employing an adaptive control scheme. The main contributions of this work are that the proposed control scheme minimizes the number of control links and global position measurements, and accounts for the uncertain vehicle dynamics. The proposed formation maneuvering controls are demonstrated experimentally and numerically.

Keywords

Multi-agent systemFormation controlNon-holonomic vehicleAdaptive control
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 189 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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