Leader-follower formation control as a disturbance decoupling problem

In this paper we present the leader-follower formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots as a disturbance decoupling problem. By means of purely geometrical conditions we show that the formation control problem is solvable if and only if the velocity vector of the leader can be measured and a scalable solution to the problem is provided. The main idea of the work is that of interpreting leader control input as a disturbance affecting the state of the leader-follower dynamic system. Extensive simulation experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.