Leader-Follower Formation of Unicycle Mobile Robots Using Sliding Mode Control

This letter presents a distributed controller for the formation of unicycle mobile robots whose aim is to follow the leader position maintaining a certain geometry in the horizontal plane. The proposed control law provides the formation of the followers with the leader’s position using sliding mode control techniques. The sliding mode controllers are designed using local interactions to ensure the convergence to zero of a couple of suitable sliding variables. The particular design of the sliding variables guarantees that the resulting sliding motion provides the asymptotic convergence of the formation errors to a bounded region around the origin.