ABSTRACT
The design objective of this investigation is to develop a swarm of intelligent robots to transport goods to and from the product lines. Due to the varying masses of the assistant robots and the environmental disturbances to robots, the trajectory tracking performances of the intelligent robots will be degraded when they are moving forward to deliver the goods and then going back to the collection area. Obviously, a non-linear control design that could effectively mitigate the modeling uncertainty of mass variations and environmental disturbances has become an important issue. Based on the reasons depicted above, this is a typical non-linear control design problem with intelligent robots; hence this problem can be treated to the non-linear trajectory tracking problem of a swarm of intelligent robots. In order to improve the computational power of a swarm of intelligent robots, an analytical solution to the trajectory tracking dynamics with respect to this non-linear tracking problem needs to be found. For this reason, we try to mathematically derive an analytical solution by transforming this non-linear trajectory tracking problem into a complex non-linear Riccati-like equation in order to solve the problem. An easy to implement non-linear control law with the lowest calculation power can be obtained if an analytical solution to the complex time-varying Riccati-like equation can be found. Based on this analytical solution, the non-linear trajectory tracking performance will be verified by simulations.
