On Composite Leader–follower Formation Control for Wheeled Mobile Robots with Adaptive Disturbance Rejection

This paper proposes a composite control strategy for the formation control of a group of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) by taking full advantages of model predictive control (MPC) and adaptive terminal sliding mode control (ATSMC) techniques. To begin with, in order to confirm the formulation stability of leader-follow system, a formation controller based on MPC scheme is proposed to assure the desired formation and the position consistency of followers. Afterward, a dynamic controller based on ATSMC scheme is developed for the leader to observe and then compensate the external disturbance as soon as possible. With the presented composite control strategy, not only the desired formation but also trajectory tracking can be simultaneously achieved, in addition to offering the leader to be robust and adaptive to overcome the uncertain disturbances. At last, the simulation results illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.