Nonholonomic mobile robot formation control with kinodynamic constraints

Formation control of multiple wheeled mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints and limited acceleration has been studied in this paper. A novel l - φ control strategy in Leader-Following structure is presented. The key idea of this method is that in short control periods the velocity space restricted by the limited acceleration of robot will be searched, and the velocity which minimizes a formation matching function is chosen so that the robots can achieve the specified formation as soon as possible within their abilities. Instead of using global knowledge, this method uses only local sensing information and little communication so it is very suitable for the distributed multi-robot systems. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate our strategy both in simulation and with two real robots.