Practical Finite-Time Formation Control for Differential Mobile Robots Under a Directed Communication Graph
研究了有向通信图下差动移动机器人的领导者-跟随者有限时间编队控制问题，通过坐标变换和分布式协议实现实用有限时间控制，并用实验验证了有效性。
Formation control of differential mobile robots (DMRs) has attracted considerable interest owing to its broad potential applications in industrial transportation, service robotics, and autonomous cooperative tasks. Accordingly, this work investigates the leader–follower finite-time formation control for DMRs under a directed communication graph. To address the kinematic underactuation problem, the heading angle is excluded from the control design, and a coordinate transformation is introduced to derive a generalized system representation for DMRs. A chattering-free fixed-time observer is developed to estimate the input to the leader, and a nonlinear distributed protocol is proposed to achieve practical finite-time formation control. Finally, two experiments are conducted under three scenarios to validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol for real-world applications.