Cooperative path following control of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems Engineering
• Autonomous Systems

Background:

• Cooperative control of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots presents significant challenges.
• Existing methods often rely on feedback linearization, which can be complex and restrictive.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel framework for cooperative path following control of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots.
• To design controllers without resorting to feedback linearization, enhancing applicability.
• To address the controllability issue of nonholonomic robots when the group reference converges to a stationary point.

Main Methods:

• Decomposition of the cooperative path following problem into independent path following and cooperative control sub-problems.
• Application of cascaded theory for non-autonomous systems in controller design.
• Introduction of a time-varying coordinate transformation based on dilation to handle group reference convergence to a stationary point.

Main Results:

• Development of effective cooperative path following controllers for nonholonomic robots.
• Controllers designed for both persistent references and references converging to a stationary point.
• Validation of the theoretical results through simulations in Matlab.

Conclusions:

• The proposed method effectively solves the cooperative path following problem for multiple nonholonomic mobile robots.
• The approach offers a robust alternative to feedback linearization for complex robotic systems.
• Simulation results confirm the practical applicability and effectiveness of the developed controllers.