Design and performance analysis of integral sliding mode for multi-robot formation control

Formation control is a fundamental coordination problem that guides a cluster of nonholonomic mobile robots to achieve a specific but arbitrary geometrical shape. This paper investigates a novel implement of integral sliding mode control (ISMC) on the leader-follower formation framework which is in presence of both matched and mismatched uncertainties. In such a framework, the posture control of follower robots is only dependent on the information from its leader, rather than the whole group. The ISMC approach is designed to maintain the inherent nature of conventional SMC that is insensitive to the uncertainties entered into control channel, known as matched uncertainties, and satisfy the performance requirement for the case of time-varying mismatched uncertainties by adopting a nonlinear sliding surface instead of linear one. The stability analysis and simulation results are included to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed strategy.