On Motion Coordination of Multiple Vehicles with Nonholonomic Constraints

Coordination of multiple vehicles has been of great interest in the control community. In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling a team of mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints to leader-following formations. We propose that it is more convenient to put the nonholonomic constraints inside the model predictive control (MPC) framework. As the first step of exploration, a dual-mode MPC algorithm is developed. The stability of the formation is guaranteed by constraining the terminal state to a terminal region and switching to a stabilizing terminal controller at the boundary of the terminal region. The effectiveness of the method is investigated by numerical simulations.