Prescribed consensus and formation error constrained finite‐time sliding mode control for multi‐agent mobile robot systems

This study addresses a predefined performance constraint control scheme by applying the concept of graph theory to a distributed wheeled mobile robot (WMR) system. The kinematic and dynamic models of the WMR systems are considered simultaneously to design a finite‐time sliding mode controller with a novel constraint control term that assures the prescribed performances such as overshoot, rising time, and steady‐state error size, for the consensus and formation errors among the distributed WMR systems. Compared with a conventional prescribed controller, the structure of the proposed constraint controller is more compact and can be conveniently implemented in actual systems. The stability conditions and finite convergence time are discussed using the Lyapunov function with the adaptive law to describe the uncertainty. Numerical simulation results of formation control for the WMR systems support the validity of the proposed control method and demonstrate its potential performance.