Formation tracking control of unicycle teams with collision avoidance

In this paper, virtual structure and artificial potential field (APF) based strategies are integrated to realize formation tracking control for a team of unicycles with collision avoidance property. Using virtual structure, each vehicle is required to track a virtual local leader (VLL) for formation maintenance. For inter-vehicle collision avoidance, the motion of each vehicle is restricted in a specified sector area containing the VLL. APF based and backstepping techniques are utilized to design controller that simultaneously satisfy these control objectives.