Low-Complexity Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots With Formation Constraints

Abstract

Low-complexity control (i.e. control avoiding complex function approximation and dynamic adaptive laws) is important in small mobile robots, which cannot be equipped with high-end communication and control hardware. However, the literature has shown that attaining low-complexity control is challenging in the presence of formation constraints such as connectivity maintenance, safety and performance constraints. This work proposes a low-complexity control design (in the framework of funnel control) which is able to handle a large set of formation constraints, while merely relying on static nonlinear feedback, without any function approximation nor dynamic adaptation mechanism. A simulation study further illustrates the method as compared to the state of the art.