Coordinated motion of autonomous mobile robots using nonholonomic reference trajectories

Modeling coordinated motion of a group of autonomous mobile robots has received significant research interest in the last decade. Previous studies have revealed that avoiding collisions with obstacles and other robots is one of the main problems in the area. Considerable amount of research effort has been concentrated on the definition of virtual forces for the generation of reference trajectories for a group of autonomous mobile robots engaged in coordinated behavior. If the mobile robots are nonholonomic, this approach fails to guarantee regulation of the tracking errors since the reference trajectories might not satisfy the nonholonomic constraint. In this work, we introduce a novel coordinated motion model inclusive of a new online collision avoidance algorithm. The proposed model enables online generation of reference trajectories for coordination among a group of autonomous nonholonomic mobile robots in terms of their linear and angular velocities; hence the reference trajectory automatically satisfies the nonholonomic constraint. Several coordinated task examples have been presented and the proposed model is verified through simulations.