Robust multi-mobile robot formation control: A fully actuated system control approach

In this paper, a control law for a multi-mobile robot formation system with the leader-follower's distance-angle tracking method is developed based on the theory of fully actuated system (FAS), where the stability under disturbance is also characterized. Firstly, the dynamic error model of the target robot formation system with disturbance is established. Once the second-order nonlinear differential equation is obtained, it will be transformed into a linear time-invariant one by deploying the fully actuated system technique. Consequently, a control law is designed to eliminate the uncertainty and drive the error dynamic to converge to zero. Finally, the robot team can move forward along the desired trajectory in the predetermined formation. At the same time, the effectiveness of the proposed method is examined by extensive numerical experiments in comparison with the conventional sliding mode control (SMC). The simulation results show that the fully actuated parameter design method has better stability and faster convergence. Moreover,the proposed method shows higher robustness against disturbance.