Leader follower based formation control strategies for nonholonomic mobile robots: Design, implementation and experimental validation

This paper proposes novel formation maintenance strategies for multiple nonholonomic mobile robots based on nonholonomic trajectory tracking techniques and dynamic feedback linearization. It also presents experimental results for formation stability and noise tolerance of the proposed and existing leader-follower based controllers using physical P3AT robots. The research focusses only on the problem of formation maintenance by multiple nonholonomic mobile robots. Two types of formation maintenance controllers are developed by transforming the follower robot's motion in to separate trajectory tracking tasks and then by applying existing nonholonomic trajectory tracking techniques. A third controller is developed through the use of dynamic feedback linearization. The proposed systems are implemented in physical P3AT type mobile robots and real-world experimental results are shown to compare the formation accuracy and the stability of these controllers.