Robust cooperative control for a group of mobile robots with quantized information exchange

In this paper we investigate the cooperative tracking control problem with quantized time delay information exchange for a group of wheeled mobile robots networked through a connected graph modeling the underlying communication topology. A cooperative controller is proposed using a combination of backstepping technique, graph theory and neural network radial basis functions. We show, using the small gain theorem, that the states of each mobile robot in the group converge to and remain inside a tube centered around its assigned trajectory to form a desired geometric pattern whose centroid is assumed to move along a predefined trajectory. Experimental results on a group of three mobile robots forming a triangular shape are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed cooperative controller.