Formation Tracking Control and Obstacle Avoidance of Unicycle-Type Robots Guaranteeing Continuous Velocities

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Coordinating multiple robots for formation tracking and obstacle avoidance presents significant challenges.
• Existing methods often struggle to integrate both formation control and obstacle avoidance seamlessly.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a unified, distributed kinematic control scheme for unicycle robots.
• To enable simultaneous formation tracking of time-varying references and dynamic obstacle avoidance.
• To ensure continuous robot velocities and proven stability during task transitions.

Main Methods:

• A novel distributed consensus-based control formulation integrating leader and followers.
• A hierarchical control scheme that combines formation tracking and obstacle avoidance tasks.
• Validation through both computer simulations and real-world robotic experiments.

Main Results:

• The proposed method achieves fully distributed control, is scalable, and formation-generic.
• It eliminates the need for a global coordinate system or environmental maps.
• Demonstrated simultaneous achievement of formation tracking and obstacle avoidance with guaranteed stability.

Conclusions:

• The developed control scheme effectively integrates distributed formation tracking and obstacle avoidance for unicycle robots.
• The approach offers a scalable, robust, and practical solution for multi-robot coordination.
• Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness and stability of the proposed hierarchical control strategy.