Formation Tracking Control of the Traffic Cone Robots System Under the Environmental Constraints

A novel formation tracking control method for traffic cone robots (TCRs) under environmental constraints is presented. In this paper, the TCRs can perform swarm behaviors and track fixed targets under environmental constraints. The formation tracking controller for TCRs is designed using feedforward control (artificial potential functions) and feedback control methods (to eliminate initial position errors). To deal with the environmental constraints (which are formulated as the bilateral constraints) in the formation tracking process, a novel transform method is designed based on the differential homeomorphism method. The TCRs’ position is bounded within a prescribed bound by the choice of a suitable mapping function. Based on the Lyapunov stability analysis, the proposed control method ensures formation tracking performance (including uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness). Under the proposed control method, the feasibility of the TCRs system is verified by a range of numerical simulations and real experiments.