Prescribed performance bound-based adaptive path-following control of uncertain nonholonomic mobile robots

In this paper, we consider the transient performance of path-following control of nonholonomic mobile robots with parametric uncertainties. By incorporating prescribed performance bound (PPB) technique, the transient performances on position and orientational tracking errors will be guaranteed with convergence rates no less than certain pre-specified values and sufficiently small maximum overshoots. We also extend the proposed scheme to solve the formation control problem for a group of N unicycle-type mobile robots without inter-robot communications. It is ensured that all the robots can track their references with arbitrarily small errors and no collision will occur between any two robots. Simulation studies verify the established theoretical results. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.