Leader-following formation control of nonholonomic robots with switching network topologies

This paper investigates cooperative output regulation for the leader-following formation problem of multirobot system. For leader-following formation (LFF) problem a distributed design approach is proposed using luenberger observer and distributed observer. The designed approach enables the robots to track the reference signal generated by the leader and also to achieve and maintain the desired formation for any initial condition. The considered exogenous system serves as a leader for the multi-robot formation and provides a driving forces for the robot formation. The dynamics of the exogenous system are different among the robots. In view of time varying interaction between robots, one case of fixed network topology and two cases of switching network topologies are considered to describe the multirobot network relationship. The theoretical results are verified through numerical simulations of four nonholonomic robots. The simulation highlights that the robots are maintaining their formation and also tracking the trajectory of the leader robot under fixed and switching topologies of the network.