Formation Control of Wheeled Vehicles on a Slope

This paper is concerned with the leader-follower formation control problem of wheeled ground vehicles moving on an inclined plane. When ground vehicles run on an inclined surface, it is important to compensate the effect of gravity acting as disturbances in order to achieve a given task. Due to the non-holonomic constraints, the gravitational disturbances acting on the wheeled vehicles change depending on their heading angles. To cope with this difficulty, we propose a new formation control method with the aid of disturbance observers which estimate and attenuate the gravitational disturbances. An experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method.