Adaptive Perturbation Suppression Control for Multiple Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Clusters Against Composite Motion Windups

The existence of compound velocity and acceleration windups in clusters of nonholonomic mobile robots can seriously constrain the smoothness and stability of the overall motion. This article proposes a leader–follower-based distributed formation control framework for smooth and robust clustering of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots under compound windups of velocity and acceleration and unknown perturbations. The decoupled position and orientation kinematics and substrate wheel velocity dynamics are modularly devised via feedback linearization techniques to enable upper-level cooperative error regulation and lower-level wheel velocity trajectory tracking. The auxiliary dynamic system based on the velocity envelope generated by compound motion windups and the WMR kinematic is integrated into the collaborative error, adaptively mitigating the detrimental windup effects. The adaptive saturated extended state observer is utilized to flatly estimate unknown perturbations in the wheel velocity dynamics with enhanced robustness. Finally, the overall stability analyses are done based on Lyapunov’s theorem, and contrastive simulations and plentiful experiments are conducted to attest to the validity and availability.