Time-Varying Formation Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With Region Constraint: A Generalized Udwadia-Kalaba Framework

Abstract

In this article, the time-varying formation tracking control of wheeled mobile robots with region constraint is investigated from a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. The communication network is modeled as a directed and weighted graph that has a spanning tree with the leader being the root. By reformulating the time-varying formation tracking control objective as an equality constrained equation and transforming the region constraint by a diffeomorphism, the time-varying formation tracking controller with the region constraint is designed under the generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. Compared with the existing works on time-varying formation tracking control, the region constraint is taken into account in this paper, which ensures the safety of the robots. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed control strategy is illustrated through some numerical simulations.