Tracking Control of Mobile Robots in Formation in the Presence of Disturbances

The displacement-based formation control for perturbed multirobot systems, with practical issues like collision avoidance and connectivity assurance, is a challenging problem. This article presents and implements a two-step design process consisting of both holonomic and nonholonomic frameworks along with a process of demonstration to solve this problem. We use the process of demonstration to obtain the parameters of the desired trajectory. In a holonomic framework, each virtual robot is described as double integrator system. This framework generates a set of reference trajectories. The idea is to feed these generated reference points for the mobile robots to track under nonholonomic framework. This article formulates control laws under which multiple mobile robots simply connected are stable while ensuring collision avoidance and connectivity. Both holonomic and nonholonomic models are subjected to external disturbances. In the holonomic framework, the proposed controller ensures collision avoidance and connectivity while maintaining the desired formation. The proposed controller in the nonholonomic framework tracks the reference trajectories while guaranteeing Lyapunov stability. The proposed approach is scalable to any
$n$
-robot systems which are simply connected. Both simulation and experimental results prove the efficacy of the proposed approach.