Distributed cooperative control for nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot systems

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, the smoothness of the distributed consensus control (DCC) protocols of multi-agent systems (MAS) with inherent nonlinear dynamics is investigated. Different from the traditional consensus protocols where variable structure control is considered for robust control, a continuous DCC is presented to achieve consensus tracking without control chattering. Using certain types of exponential functions, it is shown that different smooth DCC schemes can be constructed to achieve asymptotic consensus tracking with smooth control input for MAS with connected directed/undirected and fixed/switched communication topologies. Second, the formation control problem of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots (WMR) is solved via the continuous DCC. By converting the formation problem into consensus problem using the agents’ kinematics, the formation speed-control problem in planar motion is formulated and solved. The translational and rotational speeds inputs to the WMR are computed using continuous distributed consensus protocols to reduce chattering in the control inputs of mobile robots. The distinctive feature of the proposed consensus and formation algorithms is the high tracking precision with smooth control input to agents’ dynamics. In simulation studies, different numerical examples are illustrated to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed DCC.