Adaptive Fuzzy Behavioral Control of Second-Order Autonomous Agents With Prioritized Missions: Theory and Experiments

In this paper, we study the adaptive fuzzy formation control of multiple autonomous agents with prioritized missions. For a platoon of autonomous agents in an unknown environment containing multiple obstacles, formation control is investigated, where each agent is modeled by a second-order nonlinear system under unknown external disturbance in the Brunovsky form. We introduce the systematic procedure of null-space-based projection to convert the prioritized multimission control problem into a behavioral control problem. Then, we further develop a class of nonlinear-fast-terminal-sliding-mode-based adaptive control strategies that combine the fuzzy logic systems by jointly considering both kinematic and dynamic levels of the agents. The proposed controllers can guarantee each individual agent to achieve the predesigned desired pattern and drive the entire systems to achieve the prescribed missions. A simulation example with five agents demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithm. Finally, the strategies are experimentally validated using a platoon of Pioneer 3AT and 3DX mobile robots.