A nonlinear small-gain approach to distributed formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots

This paper proposes a new nonlinear design method for distributed leader-following formation control of unicycle robots. Nonlinear small-gain design methods are used to deal with the problem caused by the nonholonomic constraint of the unicycle robot and yield simple conditions for practical implementation. With the proposed distributed controller, the formation control objective can be achieved without assuming any tree sensing structures or global position measurements. More interestingly, the linear velocities of the robots can be restricted to specific bounded ranges.