Lyapunov and Sliding Mode Based Leader-follower Formation Control for Multiple Mobile Robots with an Augmented Distance-angle Strategy

Adaptive neural network output-feedback control of multiple Ackermann steering vehicles formation including motor dynamics with a guaranteed performance

“…The coordinated control of multiple robotic agents has attracted a lot of attention among robotic researchers and engineers due to its effective applications of vehicles teamwork in the autonomous exploration, automotive industries, intelligent transportation systems, surveillance, coverage, reconnaissance, rescue operations, and so on over recent years. 1–21 The formation control problem is related to the design of stabilizing, tracking, or path-following controllers to make a team of robots preserve or track desired postures with respect to one or more reference robots. From a literature review, there exist many research works on the formation control of robots by either behavior-based, 1 virtual structure, 2,3 or leader-following approaches.…”

“…Since car-like robots are underactuated nonlinear systems, that is, their degrees of freedom is smaller than the number of the actuators, and they also suffer from the nonholonomic constraints; the design of formation tracking controllers is a very challenging task. 1–17 From a review of the literature, 1–21 the leader-following is one of the most popular methods in the formation construction because of its reliability, scalability, and simplicity. In this approach, all the followers try to preserve their desired relative angle and distance with respect to some pre-assigned leader.…”

“…In the recent works, a variety of robots formations are addressed. 4–20 For example, a fixed-time formation controller has been addressed for multiple mobile robots in Wang et al 6 Sun et al 7 have proposed a robust distributed algorithm based on an iterative learning control for the formation of a group of differential-drive mobile robots. The leader-following formation control problem of nonholonomic robots without the needs for the full-state of the leader has been addressed in Miao et al 8 A novel distributed predictive controller has been proposed in Hosseinzadeh Yamchi and Mahboobi Esfanjani 9 for the mobile robots formation with any collision.…”

“…Recently, a sliding-mode leader–follower formation control system has been proposed for Multi-robots with an augmented distance-angle strategy. 11 To remove the requirement of the formation controllers from velocity signals in their practical implementation, output-feedback (OFB) controllers are presented in previous studies 12–17 for robots formation. However, all the previous works in the literature 1–17 address the different aspects of the formation control problem of differentially driven wheeled mobile robots 1–17 which are not applicable to automobiles and car-like robots.…”

“…However, all the previous works in the literature 1–17 address the different aspects of the formation control problem of differentially driven wheeled mobile robots 1–17 which are not applicable to automobiles and car-like robots. In spite of various theoretical results on the formation and cooperative control of multiple mobile robots, available papers in the literature 1–26 have at least one of the following shortfalls: (1) almost all the papers in the literature focus on the coordinated control of multiple differential-drive robots. Except a few elementary results in previous studies, 18–21 the literature is still sparse on the control of multiple Ackermann steering robots formation which is the main topic of this paper; (2) the cooperati...…”