Time-Varying Formation Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With Region Constraint: A Generalized Udwadia-Kalaba Framework

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel control framework for wheeled mobile robots that ensures safe, time-varying formation tracking within specified regions by leveraging a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba approach and reformulating constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a new control method that incorporates region constraints into formation tracking using a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework, ensuring safety and feasibility.

Findings

The proposed control strategy effectively maintains formation within region constraints.

Numerical simulations validate the feasibility and safety of the control approach.

The method outperforms existing techniques by explicitly considering safety constraints.

Abstract

In this article, the time-varying formation tracking control of wheeled mobile robots with region constraint is investigated from a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. The communication network is modeled as a directed and weighted graph that has a spanning tree with the leader being the root. By reformulating the time-varying formation tracking control objective as an equality constrained equation and transforming the region constraint by a diffeomorphism, the time-varying formation tracking controller with the region constraint is designed under the generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. Compared with the existing works on time-varying formation tracking control, the region constraint is taken into account in this paper, which ensures the safety of the robots. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed control strategy is illustrated through some numerical simulations.