Formation Maneuvering Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Robotic Vehicles: Theory and Experimentation

In this paper, we present a new leader-follower type solution to the formation maneuvering problem for multiple, nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots. The solution is based on the graph that models the coordination among the robots being a spanning tree. Our decentralized control law ensures, in the least squares sense, that the robots globally acquire a given planar formation while the formation as a whole globally tracks a desired trajectory. 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 proposed formation maneuvering controls are demonstrated experimentally and numerically.