On Motion Coordination of Multiple Vehicles with Nonholonomic Constraints

Abstract

Coordination of multiple vehicles has been of great interest in the control community. In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling a team of mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints to leader-following formations. We propose that it is more convenient to put the nonholonomic constraints inside the model predictive control (MPC) framework. As the first step of exploration, a dual-mode MPC algorithm is developed. The stability of the formation is guaranteed by constraining the terminal state to a terminal region and switching to a stabilizing terminal controller at the boundary of the terminal region. The effectiveness of the method is investigated by numerical simulations.