Leader-follower formation control for multiple mobile robots by a designed sliding mode controller based on kinematic control method

In this paper, a combination of kinematic controller and dynamic controller is proposed to solve the problem of leader-follower formation control for multiple wheeled mobile robots(WMR). Lidar sensor which is equipped on the leader robot is utilized to search and measure the relative distance and angle between the leader robot and each follower robot. With the relative information, a kinematic controller is designed to generate the command velocity and then the generated command velocity is taken as the reference input to the designed dynamic controller which is based on sliding mode control(SMC) strategy. Lyapunov stability theory verifies that with the designed controller all the error signals can converge to 0. Finally, a real experiment with one leader and three followers is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control system.