Path-Guided Containment Maneuvering of Mobile Robots: Theory and Experiments

This article investigates the path-guided containment maneuvering of networked two-wheeled mobile robots with multiple virtual leaders moving along multiple parameterized paths. A two-level cooperative control architecture is proposed to achieve a containment formation. At the kinematic level, distributed guidance laws and path update laws are developed for mobile robots and virtual leaders, respectively. Containment maneuvering errors are involved in the path update laws design to enforce the coordination between mobile robots and virtual leaders. At the kinetic level, two extended state observers are utilized to estimate the unknown uncertainties existing in surge and yaw dynamics. Then, antidisturbance kinetic control laws are developed through the estimated uncertainties. By using the proposed controllers, the states of mobile robots not only converge to the convex hull spanned by multiple virtual leaders, but also keep a certain formation pattern specified by the convex combination of virtual leaders. The input-to-state stability of the closed-loop path-guided containment maneuvering system is analyzed through Lyapunov theory. The effectiveness of the presented method is verified via experiment on CSICET-MR01 mobile robots.