Synchronous trajectory tracking for mobile robot network without velocity measurements between coupling robots

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the multiple mobile robots synchronous trajectory tracking problems, i.e., the robots should track their desired trajectories while synchronizing their motions with coupling neighbors to maintain a time-varying formation shape. Aiming for practical applications of the multi-robot coordination, the time-varying communication delay in information exchange channels has been taken into consideration theoretically in control design. And more specially, each robot only requires the position information of the coupling robots for synchronization purpose, which means that the proposed approach achieves synchronization without velocity measurements. A fully distributed controller is proposed for each robot and a sufficient condition is presented based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii theory and the Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) approach. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronous trajectory tracking approach.