Formation Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Without Position and Velocity Measurements

Most existing formation control approaches are based on the assumption that the global/relative position and/or velocity measurements of mobile robots are directly available. To extend the application domain and to improve the formation control performance, it is extremely necessary to avoid the use of position and velocity measurements in the design of formation controllers. In this paper, we propose new leader-following formation tracking control schemes for nonholonomic mobile robots with onboard perspective cameras, without using both position and velocity measurements. To address the unavailability issue of position measurements, the leader–follower kinematics model in the image space is developed, which can facilitate the complete elimination of measurement/estimation of the position information. Furthermore, feedback information from the perspective camera of the follower robot is used to design adaptive observers to estimate the leader linear velocity for feedforward compensation, which can handle the absence of velocity measurements such that the proposed schemes can be applied to control formations of mobile robots without mutual communication abilities. By using the Lyapunov stability theory, a rigorous stability analysis based on the nonlinear formation dynamics is provided to show that the global stability of the combined observer–controller closed-loop system can be guaranteed. Both simulation and experimental results are also given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed formation tracking control schemes.