ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the flocking problem of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots under the situations that all parameters of the robots are unknown and the robots are of limited communication ranges. Backstepping technique based distributed control schemes are proposed by introducing a p-time differential function. Formation control of a group of agents is to control the positions of the agents such that they perform certain tasks such as stabilization or tracking desired references. The research works on formation control can be roughly divided into three categories: behavior based, virtual structure, and leader follower. The chapter presents a constructive method to design flocking controllers for a group of N mobile robots with unknown parameters. The design is based on a potential function, backstepping technique and Lyapunov functions. The designed continuous control guarantees that there is no collision between any two robots despite the limited communication ranges and the size of the flock is bounded.
