Control strategies for groups of autonomous wheeled mobile robots with restricted inputs

The problem of team control is of recent interest in intelligent systems and robotics due to the broad range of applications of multi-agent systems in space missions, operations in hazardous environments, and military missions. Such systems can exhibit flexibility, reliability through redundancy, and simple hardware. This paper considers control problems in unicycle-like mobile robots with restricted inputs. The concept of flatness will be applied for generating reference trajectories, and tracking controllers will be established for the considered system with bounds on the input signals. The rigid formation control problem will then be studied and solved based on the established tracking controllers. The proposed controllers which account for the system physical constraints ensure asymptotic convergence of a group of N agents towards a desired rigid formation.