Flocking motion control for a system of nonholonomic vehicles

The applications of nonholonomic autonomous systems, such as smart cars and wheeled domestic robots, have gained much attention in the scientific and industrial communities. The non-linearities in the kinematics and dynamics of such systems pause many challenges in stabilizing their motion. In this paper, a motion control system with local and team control objectives is introduced for a flock of nonholonomic vehicles, using bounded input-output feedback linearization. The team control objectives include a navigational control system, which is implemented using smooth state feedback control laws, and a synchronization control system, which is implemented using a smooth position dependent adjacency matrix and communication graph structures. The local control objective involves a collision avoidance scheme, which is implemented using an extended Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy model. The proposed technique is successfully validated in a numerical simulation with 10 differentialdrive mobile robots.