Logic-based switching finite-time cooperative control for multiple robots with applications in library

This paper focuses on the cooperative control of multiple robots with unknown control directions. The commonly used Nussbaum-gain approach may result in large overshoot and oscillations. Therefore, we propose a new switching adaptive control method to solve the leaderless and leader-following consensus problem for multiple robots. The proposed switching strategy can make the controller quickly adapt to the unknown control directions, resulting in a better transient control performance. Moreover, the presented controller can steer multiple robots to a common value in finite time regardless of the heterogeneous unknown control directions and fully unknown nonlinearities in the robot dynamic models. This implies that the controller can achieve fast convergence rate and have strong robustness. In order to make the controller distributed, new local supervisory functions are constructed to design the logic-based switching rule. These supervisory functions are local, meaning that they are only dependent on local state information. No neigborhood/global information are needed. Simulations and experiments verify the obtained results.