Adaptive Constrained Formation-Tracking Control for a Tractor-Trailer Mobile Robot Team With Multiple Constraints

A team of multiple tractor-trailer mobile robots has many applications in areas including agriculture, logistics, transportation, etc. In this article, we propose a novel adaptive constrained formation-tracking control algorithm for the trailers in a tractor-trailer mobile robot team to track a desired formation, while satisfying multiple precision, safety, and feasibility constraint requirements during the operation. Both universal barrier function approaches and a novel state transformation scheme are incorporated to deal with constraints of different nature. Adaptive estimators are introduced to estimate the rate of change of the desired trajectories for all trailers. We show that exponential convergence to a small neighborhood of the equilibrium can be guaranteed. In the end, a MATLAB simulation example and a Gazebo simulator study further demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.