A Formation and Traction Control Design for Multiple Mobile Robots

This paper presents a decentralized controller design for formation and traction control of multiple robots with collision avoidance. The proposed control design consists of two steps: formation control design with collision avoidance and traction control design for movement of robot formation along the desired trajectory. In the first step, a formation controller is designed based on the formation graph model of multiple robots and potential function approach. Then, the traction control input is derived in the second step by locating the virtual leader at the central position of robot formation which leads mobile robots to follow the assigned trajectory in formation. In this distributed control design, parameter uncertainty in kinematic system model is also accommodated by deriving an adaptive rule for estimation of uncertain system parameters. Together with the stability analysis of the proposed controller, simulation and experiment results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the distributed controller for multi-robot coordination.