Neuro-adaptive formation maintenance and control of nonholonomic mobile robots

In this paper, the problem of fleet navigation with formation control and maintenance under leader-follower strategy has been addressed using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)-based navigation unit and artificial potential field approaches. Agents are nonholonomic ground robots. In the proposed approach, the leader or virtual leader is assumed to be the center of the formation and its navigation is guaranteed using SLAM-based controller. On the other hand, potential field control strategy is used to position all followers in a certain formation around their leader. In this work, we represents the case where the dynamic is completely unknown. In such case, an on-line NN-based adaptive model estimator is used to approximate the robot nonlinear dynamic and guarantee the tracking of a desired path. In both cases, the control strategy adds an inner loop to the system's configuration. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.