Formation control of a differential drive wheeled robot in trajectory tracking

ARTICLE INFORMATION ABSTRACT Original Research Paper Received 02 August 2016 Accepted 17 September 2016 Available Online 26 October 2016 One of the main topics in the field of robotics is the formation control of the group of robots in trajectory tracking problem. Using organized robots has many advantages compared to using them individually. Among them the efficiency of using resources, the possibility of robots' cooperation, increasing reliability and resistance to defects can be pointed out. Therefore, formation control of multibody robotic systems and intelligent vehicles have attracted considerable attention, this is discussed in this paper. First, kinematic and kinetic equations of a differential drive wheeled robot are obtained. Then, reference trajectories for tracking problem of the leader robot are produced. Next, a kinematic control law is designed for trajectory tracking of the leader robot. The proposed controller steers the leader robot asymptotically, following reference trajectories. Subsequently, a dynamic control algorithm for generating system actuator toques is designed based on feedback linearization method. Afterwards, formation control of the robots has been considered and an appropriate algorithm is designed in order to organize the follower robots in the desired configurations, while tracking control of the wheeled robot. Furthermore, the stability of the presented algorithms for kinematic, dynamic and formation control laws is analyzed using Lyapunov method. Finally, obtained results for different reference paths are presented which represent the effectiveness of the proposed controller.