Coordinated path following control of multiple wheeled mobile robots through decentralized speed adaptation

This paper addresses the problem of coordinated path following of multiple wheeled mobile robots while keeping a desired formation. The control laws proposed are categorized into two envelopes, one is steering individual robots to trace along predefined paths, and the other is ensuring tracked paths to be well defined in the formation, by means of decentralized speed adaption.Within this framework, geometric paths following are built on Lyapunov theory and backstepping techniques, while injecting helmsman like behavior into individual path following control. Speed adaption with minimum communication variable under the constraints of multi-robot communication topology, is elaborately designed without relative speeds between neighboring robots requested. The simple but effective controller design, enables multi-robot system to be coordinated and stabilized into an invariant manifold, and all speeds converge to desired profiles in addition. Simulation results illustrate the efficacy of the solution proposed.