Robust circumnavigation of a heterogeneous multi-agent system

This paper focuses on the design of robust control laws for a heterogeneous multi-agent system composed of omnidirectional and differential-drive mobile robots under the leader–follower scheme and considering the distance and orientation measurements. It is assume that the agent leader is an omnidirectional mobile robot moving freely in the plane while the rest of the agents are the followers. The control laws are designed by means of the Backstepping approach. It is proved that, although the control laws do not need information about the velocity of the leader, the followers will circumnavigate the leader. Numerical simulations and real-time experiments exhibit the performance of the proposed control strategy.