Event-Triggered Integral Formation Controller for Networked Nonholonomic Mobile Robots: Theory and Experiment
D.W.L. Wang, Suying Pan, Jin Zhou, Quan-Ke Pan, Zhonghua Miao, Jiangke Yang
Abstract
This paper deals with the distributed event-triggered formation control problem of networked nonholonomic mobile robots (NNMRs) in a leader-follower-based frame. The event-triggered mechanism (ETM) is first introduced for the design of the kinematic controller by a suitable auxiliary (or virtual) reference vector, and a unified integrated dynamic controller is then proposed in combination with backstepping technique and sliding mode approach. The designed event-triggered condition is derived based on the local communication among robots by the best use of nonholonomic property of NNMRs, which can fully guarantee to exclude the Zeno behavior before the desired formation configuration is achieved. Finally, the theoretical results are validated through simulation analysis, and then implemented on experimental platform for real-time physical NNMRs. Moreover, both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the key feature of the ETM integral formation scheme, it can effectively reduce communication resource usage and save energy while still providing comparable performance compared with the conventional periodic communication mechanism (PCM).