Angle-Constrained Adaptive Formation Control With Prescribed Performance for Multiple Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

In contrast with most existing formation control schemes, the angle-constrained formation enjoys the highest degree of freedom and is favorable for practical applications. In this article, we propose the angle-constrained-based adaptive formation shape and maneuvering control for uncertain multiple nonholonomic mobile robots, respectively. In the first strategy, the robots are controlled to form a predefined geometric pattern, while the second strategy focuses on maintaining a specific formation during collective maneuvers to support the mobile robots in their tasks (such as obstacle avoidance, area coverage, and escorting). It is worth noting that, by constructing a global performance function, the developed technique is uniform with respect to the initial states, making the control algorithm more user-friendly in practice. Furthermore, compared to the stress-matrix-based maneuver approach, the proposed method only needs a smaller number of leaders and followers’ neighbors, which can reduce the sensing links and computational cost. The experimental results are presented to verify the theoretical findings.