Feedback linearized strategies for collaborative nonholonomic robots

Collaborative wheeled mobile robots are not stable around a point by continuous time-invariant feedback. Therefore, linear control is ineffective and innovative design techniques such as feedback linearization are required. This paper presents feedback linearized control strategies for collaborative nonholonomic robots using leader-follower formation. A framework for collaborative robots is developed based on their kinematics. The development framework relies on robots having communication capabilities instead of visual capabilities. The collaborative robot system is modeled using Simulink. From the simulation results, the full state linearized via dynamic feedback strategy for the leader robot globally stabilizes the system. Furthermore, the full state linearized via dynamic feedback strategy achieves postures stabilization for the leader-follower formation. For the follower robots, the input-output via static feedback linearized control strategies minimize the error between the desired and actual formation. Furthermore, the input-output linearized control strategies allow dynamical change of the formation at run-time. Thus, for a given feasible trajectory, the full state feedback linearized strategy for the leader robot and input-output feedback linearized strategies for the follower robots are found to be more efficient in stabilizing the system.