Formation Regulation and Tracking Control for Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Networks Using Polar Coordinates

In this letter, we solve the distributed leader-follower simultaneous formation regulation and tracking control problem for nonholonomic mobile robot networks without global position measurements. The controller is designed based on the formation error dynamics in polar coordinates. Under the assumption of the network topology containing a directed spanning tree, we establish global asymptotic stability and local exponential stability for the origin of the error system in polar coordinates using Lyapunov’s direct method, and correspondingly, establish the exponential attractivity for the origin in Cartesian coordinates with the domain of attraction in any compact set. The proposed controller is time-invariant, continuous along trajectories, and does not require global position measurements. Simulations are presented to illustrate the robust performance of the proposed control method.