Distributed adaptive coordinated tracking for coupled nonholonomic mobile robots

In this paper, a coordinated tracking control problem is studied for coupled nonholonomic mobile robots with limited information of a reference trajectory. A distributed control law with adaptive time-varying gains is proposed to guarantee that the robots can form a prespecified geometric pattern while the centroid of the geometric pattern can track the reference signal. By designing the adaptive control gains, the control algorithm of this paper does not require the global knowledge of the upper bound on the leader's control input. The stability of the system is proved with the aid of Lyapunov techniques. Finally, a simulation example is presented to verify the theoretical results.