Distributed tracking control of nonholonomic multi-robot formation systems

The main aim of this thesis is to study the distributed tracking control problem for the multi-robot formation systems with nonholonomic constraint, of which the control objective it to drive a team of unicycle-type mobile robots to form one desired formation configuration with its centroid moving along with another dynamic reference trajectory, which can be specified by the virtual leader or human. We consider several problems in this point, ranging from finite-time stability andfixed-time stability, event-triggered communication and control mechanism, kinematics and dynamics, continuous-time systems and hybrid systems. The tracking control problem has been solved in this thesis via developing diverse practical distributed controller with the consideration of faster convergence rate, higher control accuracy, stronger robustness, explicit and independent convergence time estimate, less communication cost and energy consumption.In the first part of the thesis, we first study the finite-time stability for the multi-robot formation systems in Chapter 2. To improve the pior results, a novel class of finite-time controller is further proposed in Chapter 3, which is also called fixed-time controller. The dynamics of nonholonomic multi-robot formation systems is considered in Chapter 4. In the second part, we first investigate the event-triggered communication and control mechanism on the nonholonomic multi-robot formation tracking systems in Chapter 5. Moreover, in order to develop a digital implement scheme, we propose another class of periodic event-triggered controller based on fixed-time observer in Chapter 6.