A nested constraints based anti-disturbance collision-free formation control scheme for multi-mobile robot systems

Abstract

This paper investigates distributed formation control of multi-mobile robot systems with collision avoidance. A novel nested constraints based anti-disturbance formation control scheme is established, which contains two parts. In the first part, a formation signal generator is constructed on the communication network by using proper distributed cooperative control approaches and artificial potential field-based methods, such that it "completes" the desired formation control task in its outputs. In the second part, by combining proper disturbance estimations, some nonlinear tracking controllers are designed for the robots to track the corresponding outputs of the generator asymptotically. A "nested constraint mechanism" is put forward accordingly and applied to limit the generator’s outputs and the robots’ tracking errors. In this way, the studied multi-mobile robot systems realize the formation control goal with collision avoidance. Compared with existing results, the proposed method has a better plug-and-play feature to deal with the tight encapsulations of the practical robot products, and has better convergence performances with the existence of disturbances. Some experiments are given to validate the effects of the proposed methods.