Cooperative circumnavigation control of multiple unicycle‐type robots with non‐identical input constraints

Abstract

Abstract For the robot control problems, the input constraint is an issue that must be carefully considered. Considering the control inputs of the robots in the multi‐robot system are constrained by different saturations in reality, we address the cooperative circumnavigation control problem of multiple unicycle‐type robots with non‐identical and unknown input constraints in this paper. A distributed control law is designed to drive the robots constrained by different and unknown input saturations to achieve the cooperative circumnavigation around a moving target. The algorithm proposed in this paper largely reduces the requirement for the maneuverability of the robots to achieve the cooperative circumnavigation. As long as the robots owns the basic maneuverability of circumnavigating around the target, it is proved rigorously that the proposed control algorithm can achieve the desired cooperation circumnavigation of the multi‐robot system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by a numerical simulation.