Abstract
This paper deals with the problem of formation control for nonholonomic mobile robots under a cluttered environment. When the obstacles are not detected, the follower robot calculates its waypoint to track, based on the leader robot’s state. The proposed geometric obstacle avoidance control method (GOACM) guarantees that the robot avoids the static and dynamic obstacles using onboard sensors. Due to the difficulty for the robot to simultaneously get overall safe boundary of an obstacle in practice, a safe line, which is perpendicular to the obstacle surface, is used instead of the safe boundary. Since GOACM is executed to find a safe waypoint for the robot, GOACM can effectively cooperate with the formation control method. Moreover, the adaptive controllers guarantee that the trajectory and velocity tracking errors converge to zero with the consideration of the parametric uncertainties of both kinematic and dynamic models. Simulation and experiment results present that the robots effectively form and maintain formation avoiding the obstacles.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
M. Defoort, T. Floquet, A. Kökösy, and W. Perruquetti, “Sliding-mode formation control for cooperative autonomous mobile robots,” IEEE Trans. on Ind. Electron., vol. 55, no. 11, pp. 3944–3953, 2008.
T. Balch and R. C. Arkin, “Behavior-based formation control for multi-robot teams,” IEEE Trans. on Robot. and Autom., vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 926–939, 1998.
X. Chen and Y. M. Li, “Stability on adaptive NN formation control with variant formation patterns and interaction topologies,” Int. J. of Adv. Robot. Syst., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 69–82, 2008.
T. Gustavi and X. M. Hu, “Observer-based leader-following formation control using onboard sensor information,” IEEE Trans. on Robot., vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1457–1462, 2008.
O. Khatib, “Real-time obstacle avoidance for manipulators and mobile robots,” Int. J. of Robot. Res., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 90–98, 1986.
D. W. Kim, T. A. Lasky, and S. A. Velinsky, “Autonomous Multi-mobile robot system: simulation and implementation using fuzzy logic,” Int. J. of Control, Auto., and Systems, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 545–554, 2013.
M. G. Earl and R. D. Andrea, “Iterative MILP methods for vehicle-control problems,” IEEE Trans. On Robot., vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 1158–1167, 2005.
S. C. Liu, D. L. Tan, and G. J. Liu, “Formation control of mobile robots with active obstacle avoidance,” Acta Autom. Sinica, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 529–535, 2007.
K. Fujimura and H. Samet, “A hierarchical strategy for path planning among moving obstacles,” IEEE Trans. on Robot. and Autom., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 61–69, 1989.
S. S. Ge and Y. J. Cui, “Dynamic motion planning for mobile robots using potential field method,” Auton. Robots, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 207–222, 2002.
F. Belkhouche, “Reactive path planning in a dynamic environment,” IEEE Trans. on Robot., vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 902–911, 2009.
C. Leng, C. Cao, and Y. Huang, “A motion planning method for omni-directional mobile robot based on anisotropic characteristics,” Int. J. of Adv. Robot. Syst., vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 327–340, 2008.
R. L. Williams and J. H. Wu, “Dynamic obstacle avoidance for an omnidirectional mobile robot,” J. of Robot., vol. 2010, Article ID 901365, 2010.
Y. Kanayama, Y. Kimura, F. Miyazaki, and T. Noguchi, “A stable tracking control method for a nonholonomic mobile robot,” Proc. of IEEE/RSJ Int. Workshop Intell. Robots and Syst., pp. 1236–1241, 1991.
T. Das and I. N. Kar, “Design and implementation of an adaptive fuzzy logic-based controller for wheeled mobile robots,” IEEE Trans. on Control Syst. Tech., vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 501–510, 2006.
J. B. Wu, G. H. Xu, and Z. P. Yin, “Robust adaptive control for a nonholonomic mobile robot with unknown parameters,” J. Control Theory Appl., vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 212–218, 2009.
Y. Y. Dai and S. G. Lee, “The leader-follower formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots,” Int. J. of Control, Auto., and Systems, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 350–361, 2012.
M. Krstic, I. Kanellakopoulos, and P. Kokotovic, Nonlinear and Adaptive Control Design, Wiley, New York, 1995.
M. Mohan, D. Busquets, R. L. de. Màntaras, and C. Sierra, “Integrating a potential field based pilot into a multiagent navigation architecture for autonomous robots,” Proc. of Int. Conf. on Info. in Control, Auto. and Robot., pp. 287–290, 2004.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Yanyan Dai received her B.S. degree from Tianjin University of Science and Technology, China, in 2009, and her M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Yeungnam University, Korea, in 2011, where she is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in Robotics and Control. Her research interests include the formation control of multiple mobile robots and SLAM.
Suk Gyu Lee received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University, in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and he received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 1990. His research interests include robotics, SLAM, nonlinear control and adaptive control.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dai, Y., Lee, S.G. Formation control of mobile robots with obstacle avoidance based on GOACM using onboard sensors. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 12, 1077–1089 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-013-0021-0
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-013-0021-0