A hybrid control approach to multi-robot coordinated path following

The paper studies the coordinated path following problem, namely, steering a group of unicycles to a given path while achieving an inter-vehicle formation pattern. A novel hybrid control approach is proposed in the paper to solve the problem despite that the neighbors of each vehicle may change over time due to limited sensing capabilities. The state space of each vehicle is partitioned into several regions relative to the path. Then a control law is synthesized to steer all the vehicles into a region where another control law is devised to achieve both path following and motion coordination. Thus, with the state-dependent switching control law, a group of vehicles are evenly spaced on the path and move as a whole eventually.