Leader-Follower Formation Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots without Attitude Measurements

The problem of leader-follower formation of a platoon of differential-drive wheeled mobile robots without using attitude measurements is addressed in this paper. Contrary to the position-distance approaches existing in the literature, the formation and collision avoidance is achieved by introducing a state-dependent delay in the desired trajectory. The delay is obtained as the output of a dynamical system and its magnitude will decrease/increase depending on the distance between the robots. To guarantee trajectory tracking and to overcome the lack of orientation measurements, an output feedback control and attitude observer are proposed based on the kinematic model of the robots. The attitude observer is designed directly on the special orthogonal group SO(2) and it can be used in open-loop schemes. The proposed control-observer scheme ensures asymptotic convergence of the tracking and observer errors. Finally, experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed approach.