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Cooperative Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Robots for Escorting and Patrolling Mission Based on Vector Field

This paper investigates the cooperative control problem of multiple nonholonomic robots for an escorting and patrolling mission with respect to a target with a time-varying velocity. The goal of the multi-robot system is to orbit a moving target in a common circle with a prescribed radius and circular velocity, while maintaining even spacing along the perimeter of the circle. This paper proposes a distributed control strategy based on the vector field that does not require each robot to know the full state of the target. A distributed estimation law is developed to enable each robot to estimate the position of the target, and a tracking differentiator is used to estimate the velocity of the target. Based on these estimates of the target, the distributed control law is designed to ensure the asymptotic convergence of the multi-robot system to achieve the desired motion. Under some mild assumptions about the interaction graph among the target and the robots, and the velocity of the target, explicit stability and convergence analyses are presented using Lyapunov tools. Simulation results from test cases of a group of nonholonomic mobile robots verify the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control algorithms.