In many existing formation control approaches for nonholonomic mobile robots, the leader velocity is required to be measured and transmitted to the follower for controller design. Though some existing approaches can remove such a requirement, they have their respective shortcomings. For example, some are discontinuous, while others only ensure local closed-loop stability. In this article, we develop novel continuous formation controllers for mobile robots without measurement of the leader velocity such that communication between the mobile robots is not required. To address the unavailability issue of the leader velocity, observers based on adaptive control technique are proposed to obtain estimation of the leader velocity from information of the follower's onboard sensors. The effect of the velocity estimation error on the closed-loop stability is considered in the stability analysis based on Lyapunov stability theory, and it is shown that global stability of the combined observer–controller closed-loop system is ensured by the developed approaches. The effectiveness and performance of the developed approaches is illustrated using experimental results.

中文翻译：

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带速度观测器的非完整移动机器人的领导者跟随编队控制

在许多用于非完整移动机器人的现有编队控制方法中，需要测量引导速度并将其传输给跟随者以进行控制器设计。尽管某些现有方法可以消除这种要求，但它们都有各自的缺点。例如，有些是不连续的，而另一些仅确保局部闭环稳定性。在本文中，我们为移动机器人开发了新颖的连续编队控制器，而无需测量引导器速度，因此不需要移动机器人之间的通信。为了解决领导者速度的不可用性问题，提出了一种基于自适应控制技术的观察者，以从跟随者的机载传感器的信息中获得对领导者速度的估计。在基于Lyapunov稳定性理论的稳定性分析中考虑了速度估计误差对闭环稳定性的影响，结果表明，所开发的方法可确保观测器-控制器组合闭环系统的整体稳定性。实验结果说明了所开发方法的有效性和性能。