Cooperation control of multiple miniature robots in unknown obstacle environment

This article focuses on the cooperative control problem of a group of miniature mobile robots in the environment with unknown obstacles. Each robot in the group has limited sensing and communication capability. The problem is addressed by separating it into two parts. One part is the formation control of multi-robot and another is navigation control with unknown obstacles. In the first part, a flexible and fault-tolerant formation scheme is introduced. Meanwhile, the dynamic surface method is combined with backstepping sliding mode control as the tracking control law. In the navigation control part, smooth trajectory of obstacle avoidance is obtained based on limit cycle principle and distance sensor data. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical simulations and hardware experiments carried out on the real platform.