Disturbance rejection in formation keeping control of nonholonomic wheeled robots

This paper presents the results of formation keeping control of a group of nonholonomic wheeled robots within the port-Hamiltonian framework and in the presence of matched input disturbances. Two scenarios on the internal damping of the dynamics of the robots are considered: strictly output passive and loss less robots. For strictly output passive robots, the distributed formation keeping controllers drive the robots towards a desired formation, while internal-model-based controllers locally compensate the harmonic input disturbance for each of the robots. Moreover, the effect of constant input disturbances is studied considering internal-model-based controllers. For lossless robots, results on formation keeping control are presented. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the approach. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.