Bearing-only Nonlinear Formation Control for Nonholonomic Unicycles

Abstract

This paper considers the nonlinear formation control problem of nonholonomic systems, where the control of each robot merely relies on the relative bearings between the communicating robots. Although this problem has received increasing research attention recently, it is still unsolved for the nonlinear model. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a bearing-only formation control law for the nonholonomic unicycles, then the nonlinear theory and non-smooth theory are introduced to prove the global stability of the close-loop systems. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by simulation examples.