Formation Control of Autonomous Robots using Nonlinear Control

This paper presents the modeling, initialization, and control of Ackerman robots in formation, following the desired trajectory using the leader-follower scheme. Ackerman's model of a four-wheel mobile robot is taken as the base for our formation model using sets of differential equations. By using Linear Approximation and I/O Linearization, we obtain two types of decentralized controllers for each robot. Using the distance and the visibility angle between leaders and followers, we determine each robot's behaviors in the formation. The stability analysis, noise, and perturbations performances of each proposed control system is included along with computer simulations.