Distributed Active Disturbance Rejection Control of Multiple Mobile Robots for Online Workload Partition

Considering the actual multi-agent coverage process, the motion trajectories are seriously affected by disturbances and noise. In this paper, a cooperative control method based on active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) for multiple mecanum-wheeled robots (MWMR) is proposed to improve its robustness. In particular, to suppress the total disturbances during the running of each robot and reduce large computation and observation cost of high order ADRC, a reduced-order cascaded ADRC (RC-ADRC) is proposed. Moreover, distributed controller is proposed to track the expected trajectories of multiple mecanum-wheeled robots under disturbances. Compared with the proposed RC-ADRC based cooperative control scheme and PID based cooperative control one, the favorable motion trajectory tracking performance is obtained. Simulation results verify the superiority of the method.