Adaptive region tracking control for multiple nonholonomic mobile robot systems subject to collision avoidance

The paper is concerned with the region tracking control problem of multiple nonholonomic mobile robot systems with collision avoidance. The peculiar characteristic of the proposed scheme is that a class of potential energy functions is chosen to form the desired target region constraining the robots for aggregation, and some local potential energy functions are selected to maintain collision avoidance among robots. Such that each mobile robot only needs to interact with their neighbors to realize the region tracking control task. Moreover, this paper provides a new analytical framework of region tracking control for a network of wheeled mobile robots, in which the integration of the system decomposition and sliding mode control method enables to convert the nonholonomic constraint problem of the controlled mobile robot system into a holonomic constraint problem. This provides a new approach to solving the mobile robot control problem. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.