Formation control of a differential drive wheeled robot in trajectory tracking

One of the main topics in the field of robotics is the formation control of the group of robots in trajectory tracking problem. Using organized robots has many advantages compared to using them individually. Among them the efficiency of using resources, the possibility of robot's cooperation, increasing reliability and resistance to defects can be pointed out. Therefore, formation control of multi-body robotic systems and intelligent vehicles attracted considerable attention that is discussed in this paper. First, kinematic and kinetic equations of a differential drive wheeled robot are obtained. Then, reference trajectories for tracking problem of the leader robot are produced. Next, a kinematic control law is designed for trajectory tracking of the leader robot. The proposed controller steer the leader robot asymptotically follow reference trajectories. Subsequently, a dynamic control algorithm for generating system actuator toques is designed based on feedback linearization method. Afterwards, formation control of the robots has been considered and an appropriate algorithm is designed in order to organize the follower robots in the desired configurations, meanwhile tracking control of the wheeled robot. Furthermore the stability of the presented algorithms for kinematic, dynamic and formation control laws is analyzed using Lyapunov method. Finally, obtained results for different reference paths are presented which represents the effectiveness of the proposed controller.