A Hybrid System Simulation for Formation Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots:An Application of Artificial Potential Field and Kinematic Controller

This paper proposes a novel hybrid formation control technique for a group of differentially driven wheeled mobile robots in the Leader-Follower framework. In the proposed method, the leader robot of the group plans its path of navigation by an artificial potential field and the follower robots plan their path in order to follow the leader robot by maintaining a particular formation employing the separation-bearing control   l   . Thus, the resulting control problem has been transformed as a trajectory tracking control. The path planning of the leader robot in artificial potential field is discrete in nature, whereas, the trajectory tracking of the desired path is continuous in nature. Therefore, a hybrid system, which is the combination of the discrete event and the continuous systems that will act together to perform formation control is been proposed in this paper. The overall formation control technique results into a robust formation control for a group of differentially driven wheeled mobile robots. The effective performance of the proposed method has been verified in simulation.