Formation control of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots based on cascade design

Formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots is considered in this paper and decentralized linear controllers based on cascade design are proposed for a group of nonholonomic mobile robots. By using the theory of cascaded systems and cooperative control of linear agents, multiple nonholonomic robots' formation control problem is converted into multi-linear time-varying systems' stabilization problem. Linear decentralized cooperative controllers are brought out for the formation control problem when the reference targets satisfy the condition of persistent excitation which has relaxed the requirements on reference trajectory than those given in previous papers.