Time-Varying Formation Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With Region Constraint: A Generalized Udwadia-Kalaba Framework

Abstract--In this paper, the time-varying formation tracking control of wheeled mobile robots with region constraint is investigated from a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. The communication topology is directed, weighted and has a spanning tree with the leader being the root. By reformulating the time-varying formation tracking control objective as a constrained equation and transforming the region constraint by a diffeomor-phism, the time-varying formation tracking controller with the region constraint is designed under the generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. Compared with the existing works on time-varying formation tracking control, the region constraint is taken into account in this paper, which ensures the safety of the robots. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. VER the past three decades, cooperative control of wheeled mobile robots has attracted considerable attention [1]. The cooperative control of wheeled mobile robots is generally categorized into synchronization control [2]- [5], formation control [6]-[8], formation-containment control [9]-[11], and so on.