Abstract
The cooperative motion of multiple mobile robots has attracted wide attention due to its advantages in military, marine and aerospace fields, and formation control has become a significant technology in the realization of these tasks. However, most of the existing formation control designs of mobile robots do not consider the practical obstacles in the environment, and the maintenance of both formation and trajectory tracking while confronting the obstacles is still a challenging issue. Therefore, in this paper, a virtual-structure-based formation control approach is designed with obstacle avoidance for a system with multiple mobile robots. The basic trajectory is generated for each robot in the group and parameterized to keep the group in formation. A trajectory generator is then established regarding the obstacles, where a potential function is designed to adjust the basic trajectory and replan the reference trajectory to achieve obstacle avoidance. Then, a novel design for the path parameter is proposed to improve the performance of the robot group when encountering obstacles. Finally, a tracking controller is designed to achieve good tracking performance for robots, and the guaranteed performance is achieved via the Lyapunov theorem. A comparative simulation with three sets is carried out, where an objective function Fobj is designed to evaluate the tracking performance in the presence of obstacles. Besides this, a real experiment is implemented to further verify the effectiveness. The simulation and experimental results verify the good formation and tracking performance of the proposed design for a system with multiple mobile robots with obstacle avoidance.
Highlights
With the development of automation [1,2,3,4,5], mobile robots have been widely applied due to their advantages in many fields, such as in environmental inspection, area reconnaissance, maritime search and rescue, etc. [6,7]
A virtual-structure-based formation control design is proposed for a group of multiple mobile robots with the consideration of obstacle avoidance, where N basic desired trajectories are generated in advance and parameterized by the path parameter s to maintain the formation for multiple mobile robots
A tracking controller is designed to achieve the good tracking performance of mobile robots, and the asymptotical stability is guaranteed via the Lyapunov theorem
Summary
With the development of automation [1,2,3,4,5], mobile robots have been widely applied due to their advantages in many fields, such as in environmental inspection, area reconnaissance, maritime search and rescue, etc. [6,7]. Gui et al [25] proposed the leader-following approach with the combination of Lyapunov-based sliding-mode control design in the formation of multiple robots. Li et al [31] proposed leader-following controller considering the time-varying delay and nonlinear dynamics These studies exhibit good formation tracking performance for robots; since no feedback is provided by the follower, the leader-following approach cannot maintain the formation well when the follower is perturbed. A virtual structure can maintain the formation well for multiple robots and track the predefined trajectories precisely, which is applied in this paper to design the formation controller for multiple robots. Considering the obstacles in the environment, a virtual-structure-based formation control design for groups of multiple mobile robots is proposed in this paper.
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