ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the formation problem of tracking a desired trajectory for a group of nonholonomic mobile robots with unknown parameters. The mobile robot systems are allowed to have non-identical dynamics where only a subset of the mobile robot systems can obtain the desired trajectory information directly. In spite of this, a distributed adaptive control approach based on backstepping technique is proposed with which local controllers are designed by utilizing only the information collected within neighboring areas. A path-following approach by combining the virtual structure technique is presented to derive the formation architecture. In a formation control scheme is proposed for multiple mobile robots and no collision between any two robots is guaranteed. In the flocking control of a collection of nonholonomic mobile robots is proposed, where only part of the robots can obtain the exact knowledge of the reference directly.
