Consensus formation control of multiple wheeled mobile robots

In this paper, a consensus formation control approach is proposed for five wheeled mobile robots. Leader-follower structure is utilized. And the controller is divided into two layers. One of the robots is taken as the leader which has the access to the reference information and a sliding mode controller(SMC) based on a common kinematic control(KC) methods is designed for the leader robot to track the reference trajectory. The rest four robots are taken as the followers which are subjected to the designed formation errors and a terminal sliding mode control algorithm(TSMC) is proposed to realize the consensus formation control. Graph theory is utilized to describe the communication relationship between the five robots. Simulation in Matlab is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Within simulation a straight line formation with a concentric circle movement is tested.