Design of a virtual mechanism for trajectory tracking of convoys of mobile robots

This paper proposes a control law to emulate the behavior of a standard n-trailer using a multi-agent robot system conformed by a group of unicycle-type robots. A sliding kingpin technique is used in order to reduce or completely eliminate the off-tracking (oversteer phenomenon) that the trailers of this kind of systems exhibit when they are following trajectories with a certain radius of curvature. Numerical simulations show the performance of the control law and a comparison is made between the control law with and without the sliding kingpin technique.