Distributed leader-follower navigation of mobile robots

This paper presents a formated navigation based on the leader-follower approach. In this approach, the control law of the follower robot includes the states of the leader robot. This is a drawback for implementing the control laws on real mobile robots. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a new follower's control law, called the self-made follower input, in which the state of the leader robot is estimated by the relative equation between the leader and the follower robots in the discrete-time domain. On the other hand, a control law of the leader robot is designed with a chained system to track a given reference path. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated in numerical simulation.