A hybrid control strategy for multiple mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints

This paper explains a hybrid control strategy developed to coordinate multiple autonomous mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints. The robots are required to navigate in an obstacles populated environment with a predetermined geometric formation. The nonlinear robot dynamics are fully state feedback linearized in order to yield linear controllable systems while the dynamics of the environment are handled by an event based hybrid automata. The chattering effect of the switched system is tackled by incorporating sliding dynamics in the automata. The proposed system is implemented through simulation and the results are shown to verify its operation.