Leader-Follower Formation of Unicycle Mobile Robots Using Quasi-Sliding Modes

Abstract

This article presents a distributed control of unicycle mobile robots for the leader-follower configuration while maintaining a specific geometric distribution in the horizontal plane. The proposed control algorithm facilitates the formation of the follower robots with respect to the leader by using a quasi-sliding mode. The technique uses a pair of sliding variables, and the proposed controller guarantees the convergence of the sliding variables to a region close to zero. The particular formulation of these sliding variables ensures that their convergence to a bounded region around zero, provides asymptotic convergence of the formation errors towards a bounded region around the origin.