Robust Tracking Control for Non-holonomic Wheeled Mobile Robots in a Leader-Follower Formation with Time-gap Separation

This work addresses the design and validation of a time-gap synchronized leader-follower formation scheme for wheeled mobile multi-robot systems. This scheme generates reference trajectories for each robot through the estimation via observer of the delayed behavior of its predecessor. A second goal of this paper is the precise and efficient tracking of these references to achieve the desired movement of the chained formation. Therefore, a robust two-stage controller is proposed, where the angular velocity of lateral wheels is regulated in a first stage by a torque controller, with velocity references provided by a tracking controller that commands the robot’s pose in a second stage. The outlined theory is validated through successful results in simulations of multi-body dynamic models, integrating ADAMS and MATLAB.